Lost Garden

Understanding randomness in terms of mastery

2012-12-31T12:43:00.000-08:00

Instead of categorizing games as either 'games of skill' or 'games of luck', I see games with randomness as being a subset of 'games of mastery'. This view helps the designer see randomness in games as the intersection between both the player skill set and the game mechanics. By understanding the underlying skills involved in mastering randomness, we can build more meaningful games.

Discerning cause and effect from noise

One of the fundamental elements of any game is how the player learns to distinguish useful patterns from environmental noise. Without a mental model of how a system works, most games appear random or at least arbitrary. (Randomness is a concrete property of a rule set. However perception of randomness is a state of mind that can exist independent of the rule set.)

With time, experimentation and practice, some players build up a mental model with conceptual tools that let them manipulate the system to reach desired outcomes. They transform from unskilled players into skilled players.

The idea of noise is a broad one. A cluttered scene with hundreds of objects is said to be noisy. A combat scene rife with particle effects and crazed camera angles also is noisy. Noise is the extra stimuli that hides the next conceptual insight.

The perception of noise vary based off the player's skill in understanding and filtering various classes of noise. A chess board in the middle of a game is highly noisy to a new player trying to simply figure out how a knight moves. All the extra pieces and their subsequent movements are extraneous to what the player needs to learn next. However, that same chess board offers reams of insight to the advanced player. They are able to process the information and predict future outcomes based off their sophisticated cumulative models of chess cause and effect dynamics.

Categories of noise
Noise comes in a variety of categories that flow naturally from the basic skill atom we see in most game loops.

Action Noise: Uncertainty, extraneous elements or unmastered complexity in the player action.
Rules Noise: Uncertainty, extraneous elements or unmastered complexity in the processing of the blackbox rules.
Feedback Noise: Uncertainty, extraneous elements or unmastered complexity in the stimuli that shows the effect of the player's action.
Model noise: Uncertainty, extraneous elements or unmastered complexity in the player model of the situation.

Each class of noise has its own category of skills associated with filtering the meaningful signal. In a hidden object game, the visual complexity of the scene creates noise. Advanced players cope with this by mastering silhouette detection, efficient visual search patterns and object association skills. A good hidden object game players is measurably better than a new player.

Randomness as a form of noise

From this viewpoint, randomness in the form of internal dice rolls can also be treated as a class of rules noise. There other forms of randomness that map onto Action Noise and Feedback Noise, but randomness as rules noise seems to cause people the most trouble.

Since randomness is just another form of nosie, we can expect it to have several key properties:

A model: There is often an underlying pattern or model that helps players deal with the randomness
Model ignorance: This model will not be readily apparent to new players.
Learning curve: With time and education, players will learn how to appropriately deal with randomness.
Learning variables: There are also likely important variable for the system that make learning to deal with a system's randomness easier or more difficult.

Skills for player modeling of randomness

Probability and statistics provides use with a set of mathematical skills for dealing with randomness. Players instinctually use roughly equivalent concepts but modified by a set of well document unconscious biases. Instead of summarizing all of probability theory, let's cover the symptomatic player behaviors you'll see in the field.

Existing heuristics
When a player lacks a mental model for a phenomena, their immediate instinct is to adapt an existing model. They look for past experiences and skills that fit the current situation and then act accordingly. Players can pick from their personal experiences or they may use forms of social proof to follow what others are doing.

There is strong evidence that many of our default heuristics for dealing with randomness are instinctual and perhaps biological. As such, evolution selected for survival, not necessarily accuracy. This leads to a wide array of biases such as loss aversion or difficulty processing large odds.

In general, reliance on existing models is a poor method of dealing skillfully with random behavior. It is better than a purely random reaction in a pinch but is not well adapted to the engineered random systems players face in modern designs. The player can't know the properties of the random system beforehand and the wide range of different types of randomness mean that they will likely guess incorrectly.

Sampling
Perhaps the most confusing aspect of randomness it that it occurs as a result of an interaction loop. In a simple slot machine, you pull the handle once and get a single result. By its very nature, it is difficult or impossible to detect what that result might be.

So the first skill players acquire is the ability to take multiple samples of the event. For very rare events, you may need to take large numbers of samples. For common, more predictable events, you may need to sample it less often.

Sampling is a general skill that is useful for both complex, yet entirely deterministic systems and for systems with high amounts of pure randomness. Humans observe the vast universe through a tiny straw. Only by repeated and methodical exposure can we build up a more comprehensive image of what exists.

Cost of sampling
Sampling almost always has a cost. Here we see one of the more interesting economic decisions at the heart of random systems: Will the expense of sampling further result in enough improved understanding that I can then leverage in the future for outsize gains?

Averages and Variability
With large enough samples, most random systems become predictable. They tend towards an average with some variability around that average. Thus with enough sampling, the next skill that players learn is getting a feel for the 'typical result' and the likelihood of an 'atypical' result.

Advanced players of Triple Town see luck as a very minor component of the game. As you plan out 30 or 40 moves into the future, you learn that there is a very good chance that you'll get a bush or bear within your window of control. You don't know the order, but there are tools for mitigating out of sequence drops. The learned mental map of average drop rates becomes a tool to be applied skillfully.

Types of distributions
Often the player sees a variety of different types of distribution. The normal curve, multi-modal or exponential distributions are most common. Advanced players get a sense of the distribution. What will outcome is most common? What outcome is least common?

Payouts
All actions in games have payouts. Sometimes they are explicit such as a pawn capturing a rook and removing it from the board. Sometimes they are implicit such as a gift to a player that may in the future be reciprocated.

Through sampling, understanding averages, and understanding distributions, players gain a sense of the value of the payouts. In a sequence of player initiated causes and effects, how useful are the effects?

Expert players weigh these benefits against the costs reaching that average outcome.

New player mistakes due to model ignorance

There are numerous and well documented mistakes that the naive player makes when dealing with systems of randomness. With training, many such players can overcome these. Some will not. Placing an inexperienced driver in the middle of a professional NASCAR race will likely end in physical harm. Even with training, a certain population will never become competitive drivers.

Reliance on non-evidence based models
Players use existing models without considering the evidence. For example, it is common to assume that because 1D6 results in an even distribution of values, 2D6 will also result in an even distribution.

Not enough samples
Players don't sample enough instances of the game to understand the typical outcomes.

Low quality sampling
Players sample, but don't actively look for patterns. Without consciously making observations and testing those observations against future results, critical signals are often ignored. Many players will perform actions, faintly register the results but never ask 'why'.

Poor cost / benefit analysis
During the learning stages of a game, players typically over invest in learning activities, beyond what is strictly necessary to accomplish the desired result. This is seen as 'play' or 'practice' depending on how experimental the routine ends up being.

However, it is common for new players to invest huge amount of resources in activities with very little future pay off. They engage in 'play' behavior (not a consciously forward looking act) and find themselves never recouping. They misjudge when hold them, when to fold them or for that matter, when to walk away.

Balancing for skill in games of luck

Like any game of mastery, we have concepts of balance and progression in games of luck. Typical balancing techniques work

Dominant strategies
Is there an average outcome that is preferable? This is tricky to ascertain since you can still have a balanced random system where a single sampled event yield a rare outcome. When new players see this, they will scream at the top of their lungs that something is overpowered. With a reasonable understanding of combinatorics, you can guarantee that such events are interesting outliers. You can also gather metrics over a large population of games and verify that the 'game breaking outcomes' are in fact rare circumstance.

Is there any benefit to even having these outliers? I think so. They certainly add a strong emotional drama to the game that would otherwise be missing. Also players are kept on their toes and must plan for blackswan events as much as the average events. That's an interesting decision.

In Triple Town, the players that come back from a scenario with 5 ninja bears dominating their game end up being better players because of the experience. If that random outcome hadn't occurred, they would never have been pushed to take their tactical skills to the next level.

Does the game structure allow for multiple samples?
A single hand of poker is deeply imbalanced since it is prone to highly variable random outcomes. However, during a poker night or tournament, players churn through dozens of hands. This allows players to take multiple samples and use their knowledge of the game's random distributions to gain material advantages over weaker players. Thus, the right number of samples results in a more balanced game full of meaningful decisions.

Progression considerations in games of luck

You can use the following learning variables to create a progression system to help teach new players the subtleties of a random system.

Scaffolding
Can new players learn foundational rules with a small number of samples? If you start players off with a random system that takes dozen or hundreds of sample to understand, they may quite before they accumulate enough experience. Instead, use system at are reasonably easy to figure out. In Triple Town, players get grass the vast majority of the time. This helps them learn how to build up more complex structures since they learn very quickly that there's a good chance that the next object is going to be grass.

Existing schema
Is there a known random system you can mimic in order to tie into existing heuristics? For example, many games use a 6-sided die since that is a model of randomness that many players have been using since childhood.

Use of random systems that reveal structure upon inspection
One of my favorite techniques is to pull random outcomes from a fixed pool. Thus the expert players learn what they are going to get, but not in the order they are going to get it. This is the basis of all card games that disallow reshuffling.

You've got two key variables you can tweak for progression escalation:

When the pool is small, players tend to learn it quickly. By increasing the size of the pool, you require additional mastery.
Randomness without replacement ends up being reasonably predictable when sampled across the size of the fixed pool. So if your sample count is higher than the pool size, players will learn the pool quickly. If the sample count is less than the pool size, they'll learn it slowly (or never)

Black hat techniques

There are also cynical techniques that will result in players never learning the system. There are entire gambling journals dedicated to these methods since the number of human randomness hacks are quite large.

Obscuring average results through high variability and high sample requirements.
Use of artificial close calls so new players see patterns were there are none. There is a measurable sub-segment of players that process near misses as wins. These games prey on people who are essentially dyscadentic, or the random equivalent of dyslexic.
Use of social signals so players approach the game with a costly mindset.
Obfuscated odds combined with a high cost of playing.
Use of high odds that players don't process well. At a certain point the brain says 'many' and doesn't quite grasp that there is a good chance the universe may expire first.

Conclusion

A well rounded designer does not remove randomness from their games. The world is a random place and learning to deal rationally with randomness is a critical life skill. Instead, they embrace the fact that players can learn to understand and master the game's random systems.

It is your responsibility as the designer of random systems to facilitate masterful play. Put new players through a progression where you teach them the system's average results, outliers and distributions. Give them tools for managing and mitigating randomness. Create expert game modes where players roll the dice enough to manipulate the big picture.

When you use randomness as an opportunity for mastery over noise, I think you'll find that games of luck become highly meaningful games of skill.

take care
Danc.

References

Psychology of near misses

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100504173817.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121009111233.htm

Gambling addiction as a learning disability

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080326190802.htm

Building Tight Game Systems of Cause and Effect

2012-07-01T14:33:00.000-07:00

To play a game well, a player must master a mental model of cause and effect. You learn that pressing a specific button moves you forward. You figure out that a sequence of controller moves lets you dodge a fired rocket. You observe a slight pause before an enemy attack and theorize that you could fire off a headshot at that exact moment. At each stage of learning, you create a hypothesis, test it via your actions and refine your mental models of the whirring black box at the heart of the game.

This escalating refinement and mastery of new mental models and tools is essential to what makes many a game enjoyable. Such mastery obviously depends on the player. Yet it also is dependent on the designer and the systems they build. You can accidentally create a broken black box.

Not all systems are readily amenable to the intuitive formation of models of cause and effect. As a game designer, it is your job to create systems that are intriguing to master without being completely baffling. If the system is too predictable, it becomes boring. If it is not predictable at all we assume that the system is either random or spiritual in nature. Both of these are failure conditions if you are attempting to encourage mastery.

Tight and Loose systems

I am a mechanic who fixes broken black boxes. One importance concept that has served me well is to think of the relationship between systems and the feedback the game uses to describe interactions with the systems as either ‘tight’ or ‘loose’. A tight system has clearly defined cause and effect. A loose system make is more difficult to distinguish cause and effect relationships.

There is no correct ‘tightness’ of a loop. However there are clear methods of increasing either the tightness or the looseness.

Techniques for adjusting tightness

For your reading pleasure, I've put together a list of tools that I use to tweak a system's tightness. Not all are applicable to any given system but all of them should be part of an expert designer's toolkit. Some of the tools are worthy of dedicated books so I apologize up front for any obvious shallowness. For example, probability has so many subtle flavors that some designers devote their lives to studying how it impacts a player's ability to predict outcomes. At best this is an overview.

To tighten a system, I'm making the cause and effect more obvious. To loosen a system, I'm making the connection between cause and effect less obvious.

Strength of Feedback

Peggle

Tighter: Multiple channels of aligned feedback such as color, animation, sound, and touch that reinforce one another. The classic example is Peggle which uses particles, rainbows, Ode to Joy and time dilation to let you know that yes, the match is over and glorious points are being scored.

Am I using all the potential channels I need to make an impact?
Is the feedback sequenced correctly so that player can read it clearly?
Does the feedback leverage an existing mental schema so that becomes more impactful?

Looser: One channel of feedback that is weakly evident. In multiplayer FPS games often the only sense that you have that another player is near comes from the faint patter of their footsteps. Expert players gain immense satisfaction from being able to predict the location of their opponent by combining knowledge of the levels with tiny hints of where they might be.

Does the feedback have nuance that is not readily understandable upon casual inspection?
Can the feedback be combined with other non-obvious information to give a clear picture to an expert user?

Noisiness

Space Giraffe

Tighter: A clear signal of effect that is related to the cause.

What is the most important piece of information the player needs right now?
Have I removed extraneous elements that distract the player's attention?
Is my feedback at the center of the player's attention?

Looser: A multiplicity of conflicting, attention sapping signals, which are not related to cause. One of the critical skills in Jeff Minter’s Space Giraffe is learning to see through the visual noise of the psychedelic backgrounds.

Are there ambient elements I can add that distract, but don't annoy?
Can noise create a perceptual puzzle for the player?

Sensory type

Assassin's Creed 3: Nice use of contrast and perspective

Tighter: Visually or tactile feedback is often more clearly perceived. Consider the many billions of dollars spent on improving visual feedback each year so that we can demonstrate the visceral impact of a players bullet on simulated flesh with ever greater fidelity. Tight visual feedback is highly functional; it communicates the effect to the player in an elegant efficient fashion. It is not just about making pretty pictures. In a recent update of Triple Town, we changed the color scheme so that the background was the same general value as the foreground objects. The result was attractive, but players were pissed because the icons weren't nearly as visible as before.

Am I using good visual design such as color, motion, contrast, line, white space, shadow, volume, perspective so that my visuals read clearly?
Did I make something pretty when I needed something functional?
What feedback is functional and what is evocative or aesthetic?
Am I over investing in visual feedback?

Looser: Auditory and smell are less clearly perceived. Not as much has been done here, but due to the looseness that come such systems it would seem that there are potential systems of mastery. It is perhaps ironic that most music games, a topic typically associated with auditory mastery, can be played with the sound turned off.

Tapping Existing Mental Models

Plants vs Zombies

Tighter: Closely map the theme, feedback and system to existing mental models. Due to decades of exposure to pop culture, players know how zombies move and that they should be avoided. One means of quickly communicating the dozens of variables in a particular slow moving group of monsters is to label them 'zombies'.

What is the cartoon model that players have in their heads (vs the 'realistic model of how the real world works)?
Does my theme support my mechanics?
Does my theme inspire useful variations on my core mechanics?
Am I engaging in the cardinal sin of watering down my mechanics to fit the theme?

Looser: Step away from existing models and introduce the player to new systems that they've never experienced. Consider the metaphors involved in Tetris. Falling elements are something our brain can process as reasonably familiar. Tetriminos that you fit into lines that disappear to earn points while Russian music plays? That doesn't fit any known metaphor that I know, yet it results in a great game.

At what point do I no longer need a gateway schema and the game can stand on its own internal consistency?
Are there opportunities for surrealism or intentional disorientation?
Can we step away from cliches to synthesis fresh experiences?

Discreteness

Advance Wars: Limited units and small numbers.

Tighter: Discrete states or low value numbers. Binary is the tightest. For example, recently we were playing with units moving a various speeds. By making them move a 1, 2, and 4 tiles/sec, it suddenly became very obvious to the player how each unit type was distinct. This is one of my favorite techniques for getting unruly systems under control.

What is the minimum number of values that I need to create meaningful choices?
Can player clearly distinguish between the effect of each increment in value?
What would happen if I had to reduce this variable to 3 discrete values?

Looser: Analogue values or very high value numbers. For example, in Angry Birds, you can give your bird a wide range of angles and velocities. This makes the results surprisingly uncertain. Think of how predictable (and boring) the game would be if you could only pick 2 distinct angles and velocities.

Do I have enough range that players can play creatively?
Do my values add interesting uncertainty to choices?

Pacing

Diablo Loot Pacing

Tighter: Short time lapses between cause and effect. When creating mouse over boxes like you find in Diablo, a common mistake is to add a delay between when the mouse is over the inventory item and when the hover dialog appears. If the delay is too short, the hover dialog pops up when the player doesn't expect it. If the delay is too long, the dialog feels laggy and non-responsive. (In my experience, 200ms seems ideal. That's right inside the perception gap where you've decided to do something, but your conscious mind hasn't quite caught up)

Where does the game play lag?
What happens if I speed timing up?
What happens if slow timing down?
What systems allow me to vary timing in an indirect fashion?
Am I adjusting pacing using manual content arcs when I could instead use with algorithmic loops?

Looser: Long time lapses between cause and effect. Too long and the player misses that there is an effect at all. Imagine an RPG where you have a switch and a timer. If you hit the switch, a door opens 60 seconds later. Surprisingly few people will figure out that the door is linked to the switch. On the other hand, early investment in industry in Alpha Centauri resulted in alien attacks deep in the end game. This created a richer system of interesting trade off for players to manipulate over a long time span.

What are the longer loops in the game?
Are there long burning effects that cause players to reconsider their models for long term play loops?

Linearity

Castlevania Medusa movement (via Kotaku)

Tighter: Linearly increasing variables are more predictable. Consider the general friendliness of throwing a sword in a straight line in Zelda versus catching an enemy with an arcing boomerang while moving.

What happen if I simplify the model and make the reaction linear?
How can I remove non-linear systems from early gameplay?

Looser: Non-linearly increasing variables, less so. The Medusa heads in Castlevania pose a surprisingly difficult challenge to many players because tracking them breaks the typical expectation linear movement. Even something as commonplace as gravity throws most people off their game. After all, it took thousands of years before we figured out how to accurately land an artillery shell.

What systems are exponential in nature?
How do I constrain my non-linear systems so they are predictable?
How do I create interestingly chaotic behavior via feedback loops?

Indirection

SimEarth

Tighter: Primary effects where the cause is directly related to the effect. In Zelda again, the primary attack is highly direct. You press a button, the sword swings out and a nearby enemy is hit.

What systems can I remove to make the results of an action more obvious?
Is my cognitive load high enough?

Looser: Secondary effects where the cause triggers a secondary (or tertiary) system that in turn triggers an effect. Simulations and AI's are notorious for rapidly become indecipherable due to numerous levels of indirection. In a game of SimEarth, it was often possible to noodle with variables and have little idea what was actually happening. However, the immense indirection yields systems that people can play with for decades.

How can simple system interact to create useful indirect effects?
How can I layer useful indirect effects to create wide expressive opportunities for the player?

Hidden information

Mastermind

Tighter: Visible sequences that are readily apparent. For example, in Triple Town we signal that a current position is a match. The game isn't about matching patterns so instead the design goal is to make the available movement opportunities as obvious as possible.

Is there something hidden that shouldn't be?
Is there something visible that doesn't matter?

Looser: Hidden information or off screen information. A game like Mastermind is entirely about a hidden code that must be carefully deciphered via indirect clues. Board games that are converted into computer games often accidentally hide information. In a board game, the systems are impossible to hide because they are manually executed by the players. However, in computers the rules are often simulated in the background, turning a previously comprehensible system into mysterious gibberish.

Would hiding information fully or partially make mastery more challenging?

Probability

Tighter: Deterministic where the same effect always follows a specific cause. In a game like chess, the result of a move is always the same; a knight moves in an L and will capture the piece in lands upon. You can imagine a variant where instead you role a die to determine the winner. You can make that tighter again by constraining the probability so that certain characters roll larger dice than others. The 1d20 Pawn of Doom is a grand horror.

How do I make the outcome highly deterministic?
Is this direct action still interesting if repeated hundreds of times?

Looser: Probabilistic so that sometimes one outcome occurs but occasionally a different one happens. In one prototype I worked on there was both a long time scale between the action and the results as well as a heavily weighted but still semi-random outcome. Players were convinced that the game was completely random and had zero logic. If you pacing is fast enough and your feedback strong enough, you might be able to treat this as a slot machine.

Do I need a simple method of simulating a complex system?
Do I need a means of adding interesting pacing to the game?
Does the player perceive that they have the situation under controls despite the randomness?

Processing Complexity

SpaceChem

Tighter: System requires simulating few steps to predict an outcome. In a vertically scrolling shooter, you see the bullet coming towards you. It doesn't take a lot of thought to figure out that if you stay in that location you are going to be hit.

How much can the player process in the time allotted?
Are players getting mentally fatigued playing the game?

Looser: System requires simulating multiple steps to predict an outcome. On the other hand, in Triple Town, good players need to think dozens of moves ahead. Thinking through all the various machinations necessary to get the result you want adds a serious cognitive load to the player. A single mistake in the player's calculations yields unexpected results.

Do players feel smart?
Can players plan multiple moves ahead?
Can players debug why their plans didn't work?

Option Complexity

Steel Battalion

Tighter: Fewer options are available to consider. In a recent upgrade system I was building I give players 3 choices for their upgrades. I could have given them a menu of 60 upgrades, but that would be rather overwhelming. By focusing the user on a few important choices, I give them the mental space to think about each and pick the one with the biggest impact.

Can I reduce the options?
If I had to remove one choice, what would it be? Would the game be better?
Which options are the most meaningful?

Looser: A large number of options must be considered. In a game of Go there are often dozens of potential moves and hundreds of secondary moves. This options complexity is a large part of why the game has been played for thousands of years.

How do current options yield an exploding horizon of future options?
How do I re-balance outcomes to make more options useful?

Social Complexity

Death of Lord British in Ultima Online

Tighter: Another human broadly signals intent, capabilities and internal mental state. In an MMO, a player dresses as a high level healer and stands in a spot where adhoc groups meet up. There's a good chance you know what they'll do if you ask them to go adventuring together. Or in a managed trade window, you know exactly what you are getting when he puts up a potion for your sword. There is little ambiguity.

Can I make a character automatically signal future intent via their current actions?
Do the options collapse to a reasonable number so that I can predict what the other player might do if they are acting rationally?
Do I know enough about the goals and resources of the other player?
Have a spent enough time with the other player to model their internal state?
Are there predictable methods of interacting between players?

Looser: Another human disguises, distorts or mutes intent, capabilities and their mental state.

Can people communicate?
Can people lie and what is the impact of that?
Can people harm others? Can they help? Are there repercussions?
To what degree is my choice dependent on another player's choice?
What are group dynamics that influence behavior?

Time Pressure

WarioWare

Tighter: Requires simulating the model at the player’s preferred pace. This is related to processing and option complexity since players can only execute their models at a given pace. Players are more likely to make causal connections if the time pressure is greatly reduced. For example, the game NetHack has complexly interwoven systems that require real detective work to decipher. In order to increase the likelihood that players will make the connection, the game is set up as a turn-based game where players may take as much time as they want between turns. You'll see that as the situation becomes more complex, even good players will slow down their play substantially so they can understand all the ramifications.

How much time does the player need to understand what is happening?
Can I let the player choose their pacing or do I need to force a universal timing?
What are the multiplayer ramifications?

Looser: Requires simulating the model quickly. In a game of WarioWare, there isn't really much complexity involved in each individual puzzle. However, we can dramatically ramp up the cognitive load and increase outcome uncertainty by setting a very short timer.

Would time pressure push the player's cognitive load into a pleasurable flow zone?
Is the player feeling analysis paralysis?
Is the player feeling wildly out of control?

Applying the tightening techniques

When I run into the common situation where players don't understand the system, I often use the tightening techniques to make the system's cause and effect relationship more crisply defined for the player. In almost all cases, my changes are in response to observations stemming from playing a prototype myself or from watching someone else play a prototype. I find them to be most useful as tuning techniques and less reliable for making grand plans in the absence of functional code.

Gameplay is composed of loops and these loops have distinct stages (Actions, Rules, Feedback, Updating of the player's mental model). Depending on where in the loop the observed issue might be, I use different techniques to tweak it.

Action Problems

Option complexity
Pacing

Rules Problems

Processing complexity
Probability
Indirection
Linearity

Feedback Problems: Feedback failures are the most common error I find when dealing when implementing known systems. Most new designer make feedback errors. Intermediate designs often focus on feedback to the exclusion of other problem areas.

Strength of feedback
Noisiness
Sensory Type
Hidden information
Discreteness

Modeling Problems:

Time pressure
Tapping existing mental models

Tightness vs the stage of player mastery

Skill loops build upon one another. The jumping in Mario evolves into advanced platform navigating skills. What I find is that often the lowest levels of skill loops need to be the tightest. These are the systems you need to be most obvious in the first seconds of play...they are the gateway into the rest of the game, so to speak. Keep the number of options low, tap into existing mental models and make the cause and effect as crisp and obvious as possible. Then once the player is comfortable manipulating the basic system, you can introduce looser connections that take more effort to master.

The player's perception of tightness and looseness changes over time. There's a mental chunking operation that occurs as we master skills. Sequences that were once confusing and complex get reduced down to easily repeated and manipulated patterns. So the higher level skills that are made of multiple chunked precursor skills end up feeling very clear and obvious. You'll often find controls that a new player describes as twitchy or sloppy are described by an expert player as extremely precise and tight. Mastery can turn loose systems into tight tools.

Conclusion

New designers often treat the systems at the heart of their games as inviolate features of nature. The properties of a sniper rifle, the combo system in Street Fighter or the energy system in a farming game are treated as mathematical facts. You can tweak some values, but the basic system has always existed and will always exist. Yet the truth is that these systems were invented and then adopted because they had useful properties. They are easy to pickup, yet provide sufficient depth for long term mastery. They are designed artifacts.

We can design new systems that hit the sweet spot between mysterious and boring. By looking at your new games through the lenses listed above (and likely some others that I'm forgetting) you can iteratively tune the systems, models and skills at the heart of your game to be more or less understandable. By following a methodical process of invention, you can take a weak game and turn it into a great game that dances hand-in-hand with player capabilities.

take care,
Danc.

Goodbye Realm of the Mad God

2012-06-18T21:45:00.000-07:00

It is hard to let go of something you’ve worked on for such a long time, but such is life.

After a rather successful launch of Realm of the Mad God on Steam and Kongregate, our partners at Wild Shadow Studios decided that the best course of action was to sell the game to a larger operator, and we agreed to sell our stake alongside them.

Kabam will be operating the game from here on out and Willem Rosenthal, who has been designing the new dungeons and loot in RotMG for several months now, will stay on board to guide the project going forward.

Before

RotMG will always be a special game for David and I. Alex Carobus is one of the most talented programmers we’ve ever had the pleasure to work with, and the game itself pushed the boundaries of what an MMO could be. When we started out, RotMG had the bare bones of a multiplayer bullet hell shooter. The foundations of the game were fascinating: coop only, permadeath, procedurally generated worlds, and retro 8-bit art. It had such promise, but it was on track to end up as just another interesting game jam prototype.

After

Over the course of 2+ years, we worked with Alex to turn RotMG into a full-fledged MMO with more meaningful cooperation, a trading system, guilds, a compelling advancement system and community full of passionate players. We measured fun, retention and monetization and steadily increased all of them. At this point, millions of people have played a game that at first glance appears to be a niche hobby project.

I'm particularly proud of how monetization turned out in RotMG. The game is completely free-to-play, but it is not a pay-to-win game. Skill matters (much more so than in many other games) and the items we offer for sale for hard currency never imbalance the game. In fact, some purchases (such as dungeon keys) are highly social purchases that can benefit free players as much as they do the original buyer.

If you are interested in learning more about how RotMG evolved, David gave a lecture at GDC that you can watch for free at: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015659/Realm-of-the-Counter-Intuitive

We wish the best of luck to Kabam as it proceeds to make the most of a very special game. And to the RotMG community: we want you to know how grateful we are for the years of support and encouragement you gave us. We appreciate how hard you pushed us to be better at our craft, and how warmly and generously you treated us when we weren’t screwing things up. ;-)

We wish we could have continued to grow RotMG alongside you, but we know we’re leaving you in good hands. In the meantime, we’re going to keep cranking away on a couple of new online games that we’ve been quietly developing for the past year or so. We can’t wait to share 'em with you!

-'Chedd' and 'SpryFox' signing off from Realm of the Mad God.

Looking to hire unicorn programmer for Spry Fox

2012-05-17T15:53:00.002-07:00

Hi everyone -- my company Spry Fox is looking to hire a senior-level engineer/developer. If you are not this person but have worked with someone you love and trust, let me know!

Job title
We don't really do titles here. Feel free to call yourself something amusing and/or impressive.

What we're looking for...

Senior level engineer (five to ten years of work experience, minimum.)
Can program both the front end and back end of an original online game - by themselves or as half a team of two
Has worked on multiple shipped games in the past
Very comfortable with frequent, rapid iteration (daily to weekly)
Excited about original, free to play games
Familiarity with Flash and Unity is a major plus but not a requirement. It's actually more important for whomever we hire to be flexible and not wedded to any given language, as we frequently find ourselves adjusting our tech to meet specific circumstances.
You must be a self-starter who can work effectively without being closely managed or prodded. This is a company for entrepreneurs, not worker bees.
Reliability and honesty are essential. We love working with nice people.
Location is not an issue; we all work remotely. But if you live in Seattle or the Bay Area, you'll get to have lunch with us pretty regularly. :-)

About us
Spry Fox is a successful developer of online games that have collectively reached over 30m people. Our titles include Steambirds, Triple Town, Realm of the Mad God and Panda Poet. We are passionate about two things: making great original games and bringing happiness to the world. It is kind of a sweet gig.

Send unicorn intros to jobs@spryfox.com

take care,
Danc and David

Prototyping challenge: Make a web-based 3D modeling toy

2012-05-06T17:48:00.000-07:00

I'm rather obsessed with user generated content, particularly art tools. Recently, I had a wonderful experience with Realm of the Mad God. Alex Carobus added in a simple pixel editor that allowed anyone to create sprites that might be used in the game. Very rapidly, players created thousands of truly delightful pieces of art.

Inspired by this, I set a design challenge for myself.

3D in a browsers. What is an easy-to-use 3D modeling tool that lives in the browser?
Unique style: I want the output to be instantly recognizable as being created in this toy. That means radically constraining the tools. Instead, I was particularly inspired by the extruded 3D style of Land-a Panda.

Minimalism: Are there any ways of simplifying 3D modeling? What is the pixel editor equivalent of a 3D modeling tool?
Professional results: Can we build something where you look at the results and think "Wow, that is really nice." Think of it as the Instagram effect. I'm particularly targeting casual games, but I suspect if that is nailed, people will find all sorts of uses for the toy.

What I'm avoiding:

No copying an existing tool. Sure there are well established paths for 3D modeling or vector editing, but that is too easy. Lets go back to the design roots of these complex monstrosities and build up something elegant and different.
No voxels: I don't want to use voxels. Minecraft already does this so let's push in a wacky new direction.

The closest I've found that fits these constraints is the amazing TinkerCad, which is a simplified solid modeling tool. It is very nice, but only really ticks the first checkbox.

Here's what I've come up with. If anyone find the idea curious enough and wants to build a prototype over a few weekends, I'm happy to collaborate. This wacky, broken and experimental. But what is the fun in sharing only perfect ideas?

Model Toy

Model Toy: An easy to use drawing and modeling tool for making stylized objects

Model Toy is a 'back to the roots' effort that asks if you can make a modeling tool by only manipulating vertices on simple curves. The tool is made of several basic elements

Grid-based drawing plane: All drawing occurs on a plane. This can feel more like a 2D tools than a 3D tool.
Shapes: The key primitive is a unique extruded vector shape defined by 4 points on a plane. 99% of the time, the artist is moving around vertices.
Shape Palette: A list of available primitive shapes.
Shape Properties: List of the current shape's color, extrusion, etc.

Shapes

The heart of the tool are these odd 2D path-based primitives that Pete Blois and I have been experimenting with. You can play with an example of it here: http://apps.blois.us/Drawing

The shape is a 2D vector composed of 3 to 4 vertices.
Each vertex is either a rounded corner, half rounded or straight corner.
Vertices only snap point on the grid.
The shape can be extruded and beveled.

These actually came out of a lot of different experiments and I realized something really obvious.

Engineers tend to make art primitives that have lots of knobs and widgets...they are highly parametric objects with a complex interface.
Yet, many artists don't necessarily think in terms of complex objects. Instead, they use simple things that are easily manipulated and then repeat the same tweaking action thousands of times until the composite result is interesting. There are no explicit 'rotation' or 'scale' operation when painting. Yet the results are still impressive.
So this design preferences 'tweaking thousands of times' over 'a complex object where you set variables once'.

Basic move, scale and translate operations

One interesting aspect of these primitives is that they don't have an explicit scale, rotation or translation matrix for the user to manipulate. Instead, all those operations are performed by moving vertices around. That's all you really do in this tool...move vertices about.

Move shape: Click on a shape to select it. Drag on the body to move it around. This moves all vertices together. Note that all vertices always snap to the grid.
Deformation: You can deform a primitive by moving its vertices in a 3D plane. Drag on the square surrounded a vertex to move it to a new grid point.

Rotate: To rotate, move vertices one by one until the new shape looks rotated. This is not true rotation since the snapping to the grid will not allow true rotation. However, the result will look rotated and that is all that matters in art. This works surprisingly well.

There are big limits on the shapes

We could allow thousand of these objects on the screen. But instead I'm inspired by the elegance of low resolution pixel art where beauty comes from working within limitations.

All vertices are constrained to a 16x16 square grid. This allows for easy selection of vertices and accurate adjoining of shapes.
There are only 32 shapes in any one model. This encourages the artist to create elegant compositions.
Each shape is one of 16 colors in a fixed palette.

Shape Toolbar

There are four basic shapes you can create with this method. Click one of the primitive button on the toolbar and the shape is added to the scene.

Circle: 4 rounded vertices
Rectangle: 4 straight vertices
Half Circle: 3 vertices: 1 curved and 2 half curve / half straight
Triangle: 3 straight vertices

Example shapes that can be created by moving vertices about on grid

One system for defining hidden control handles

The follow is one method of getting the desired curves using bezier handles. Straight corners are a trivia case, but round and half round need to be tweaked to allow for aesthetically pleasing circular geometries.

For round corners, handles are defined only by adjacent vertices (vertex 2 and 3 are adjacent to 1)
Handles are parallel to the line segment ‘a’
Length of handle is proportionate to segment ‘a’ (Note that the .27 in the diagram is a value that results in 4 round corners arranged in a square yields a perfect circle. There is likely a mathematical means of deriving this as well, but that is beyond me. :-)

For half round, half corner points, calculating the normal based off the points adjacent to vertex 1 (in the picture above) results in a bowed out shape.
Instead, mirror point 2 across the line segment A. This creates a new ‘Fake A’ that goes in the correct direction.
The new curve handle for point 1 is now parallel and proportionate to ‘Fake A’

What this toy lacks

2D scale and Rotation: With such simple primitives that are easily rearranged, we don’t need these operations.
Full color picker: You can’t define arbitrary colors
Layers and grouping: With 32 shapes, a shape list is the layer list
Lines: There is only the shape color. Later on, we can have effects that apply to the object as a whole.
Empty shapes: Shapes always have a fill color.

Extending to 3D

To the left is the side view palette. This is a bit like a layer palette in photoshop, but it also lets you control Z-depth. This is a bit geeky and isn't my favorite part of the design, but worth trying.

Dragging on the body of the shape moves it left or right. This is changing the depth of the object.
Dragging on the left side of the shape extrude backwards. This snaps to the grid.
Dragging on the right side extrudes forwards. This snaps to the grid.
The profile of the shape shows its bevel.

Other shape Properties

You can select a shape and edit its properties.

Color: Click a shape, click a color and the shape becomes that color.
Bevel: Select the bevel for the object. No bevel, rounded corners, dome, flat bevel
Extrusion: Select how far you want the object to be extruded.

Open questions

Is this expressive enough?
Is there a better method of expressing the 3D extrusion?
How might it be simplified even further?

Near Future

The first part of the challenge is to get a basic editor up and running. For these new drawing tools you usually need to build it and then iterate on it 5 to 10 times so that the feel of the program is solid.

Web-based editing, saving and viewing
The model is editable in a browser window. You can save to a database and load. You can share the model with another user and they can make a copy of it and edit their own version.

3D view
Once you have a 3D view you can rotate the drawing plane to see the object from from various angles. Some experiments to try:

The plane always snaps back to the frontal view when you release.
Alternatively if you rotate the object 90 degrees, it snap to the side view and swap the side view for the front view in the other palette.

Export options

3D model: Exports a static 3D model for import into something like Maya, 3DS or Unity.
Bitmap: Export as a series of X (64?) images rotated around a center point. Includes Alpha

Far future

Shader sets
Users can load in different shader sets as alternates to the base 16 colors. For example, there is a wood set that has different types and tones of wood. Or there is a metal set that has pitted bronze, steel and copper.

Post processing and Lighting Presets
You can apply a variety of preset post processing filters much like Instagram. Honestly this is where the magic occurs. The idea is that these are incredibly high quality professional filters that give your simple model a distinct style.

Outline: Add an outline to the image so that it looks like Land-a-panda.
Pop art: Dot shading.
Sepia: Grainy, old timey image

States
Define states for each model with each state have a different configuration of the 32 shapes. For example, you could have a walk state and an attack state for a character.

Now if you bundle these states into templates, you could provide users with a 'character template' that they can fill out to their heart's content to create a thousand unique characters that all 'work' the same.

Animations between states
Allow for tweening animations between states. Add ease in and ease out for basic timing.

Conclusion

This odd art toy is not a perfect tool. Having made art for a few decades now, I'm not sure there is such at thing. Instead it is series of constraints. The theory is that these constraints will yield interesting art when placed in the hands of motivated artists. We've seen this happen before. Vector art is a style that emerged from the limits and strengths of printing technology. Pixel art emerged from the constraints of early computer displays. There is an exuberant creativity within carefully chosen walls. Is it possible to artificially foster that?

Mostly I wanted to share these ideas. For the folks that love an oddball project, this might be fun to play around with for a weekend or two. It is certainly a way to learn about curves, 3D extrusions (and the exquisite pain of iterating on an artist-centric UI.) I'd be delighted to give feedback and try out prototypes if any emerge.

Long term if the basics works out, I could see making an entire professionally polished game in this art style with every single character, wall, door and tree built out of these shapes. This is the real test. Once you get artist trying their hardest to build real things with a new art tool, a feedback loop is born. The artist asks for tiny yet critical features you could have never imagined. After a few dozen iterations, the simple odd tool begins enabling amazing artists to create a certain kind of masterpiece.

take care,
Danc.

Prototypes!

In order to keep all the learning going on in one spot, here are the prototypes that folks have made so far and feedback to each:

Pete Blois's Model Toy - Iteration 3
http://apps.blois.us/Drawing

This was the first prototype Pete and I iterated on and got the basic primitives working.

Jeiel Aranal's Model Toy - Iteration 1
http://subjectnerdagreement.com/modelingtoy/

This one was done in Unity and has manual control handles and some extrusion. Thoughts here:

Drag to move shape: The ability to click on a shape and drag it on the plane will make the tool much easier to use. (You can put rotate the view on right press or by dragging on the empty canvas.)
Auto-control handles: One of the neat things about the little 4 point vector objects is that the control handles are automated and not actually visible to the user. The intent is that every time you move a vertex, you look at the adjacent vertices and then calculate the length and orientation of the handles. This really simplifies the use of the tool since many users find manual control handles fiddly. (Though you did a good job putting them in!)
Hit region on handles: In the current build, the hit region is the circular vertex. If you use the rectangular region behind the vertex, it will be much easier to grab the vertex.
Mouse over: Outlining / highlighting the object on mouse over and showing the vertices makes it much clearer what you are about to manipulate.
Ctrl or Alt drag to duplicate: This is a classic short cut that makes it much easier to make complex objects. Works when combined with 'Drag to move shape'.
Slightly tilted drawing plane: A more complex tweak is to make the drawing plane tilted so that you are always drawing in 3D space. Since everything is still on a grid, it should be possible to still treat it as primarily a 2D drawing surface. This does require that the drawing plane be aligned with the face of each selected object.

Mikko Mononen's Model Toy - Iteration 1
https://tinkercad.com/sketch/curve/

A lovely testbed for the 2D shapes. It is clear that there is something off with the control handle behavior.
Maybe adjust the control handles independently since currently they are completely symmetrical. Perhaps bisecting A in some manner may give a better value for each handle
The whole thing starts feeling much better if you can drag directly on the shapes themselves to move them around the 2D drawing plane.
Same thought as above on the tilted drawing plane.

Loops and Arcs

2012-04-29T17:15:00.000-07:00

Here are two tools I've been using lately to better understand the functionality of my game designs. The first is the loop, a structure that should be very familiar to those who have looked into skill atoms. The second is the arc.

Loops

The 'game' aspect of this beast we call a computer game always involves 'loops'.

The player starts with a mental model that prompts them to...
Apply an action to...
The game system and in return...
Receives feedback that...
Updates their mental model and starts the loop all over again. Or kicks off a new loop.

These loops are fractal and occur at multiple levels and frequencies throughout a game. They are almost always exercised multiple times, either within a game or by playing the game multiple times.

Nested, dependent loops yields complex feedback loops and unexpected dynamics. Loops tend to deliver value through the act of being exercised. Thus they are well suited for mastery tasks that involve trial and error or repeated exposure. The goal of both loops and arcs is to update the player's mental model, however loops tend to rely on a balance of the following:

Interrelated actions that trigger multiple loops in order to bring about specific system dynamics.
Systems of crisply defined cause and effect that yield self contained systems of meaning.
Functional feedback that helps players understand causation.

Loops are very good at building 'wisdom', a holistic understanding of a complex system. The player ends up with a mental model that contains a thousand branches, successes, failures and nuances that lets them approach new situations with confidence.

Arcs

'Arcs' have similar elements to a loop, but are not built for repeated usage. The player still starts with a mental model, they apply an action to a system and receive feedback. This arc of interaction could be reading a book or watching a movie. However, the mental model that is updated rarely results in the player returning to the same interaction. The movie is watched. The book consumed. An arc is a broken loop you exit immediately.

Arcs are well suited for delivering a payload of pre-processed information. You'll typically find many arcs have the following footprint:

Simple independent actions such as turning a page or watching a movie
Simple systems that rely heavily on complex mental models to have meaning. Text on a page is a good example.
Complex evocative feedback that links together existing mental models in some unique, interesting or useful manner. For arcs, the feedback is 99% of the payload and the actions and systems are simply a means to an end. Once this payload is fully delivered, the value of repeated exposure to the arc drops substantially.

Arcs are highly efficient at communicating 'success stories', a singular path through a system that someone else previously explored. The best teach a lesson, either informative, positive or negative. This is a brilliant learning shortcut but the acquired knowledge is often quite different and less robust in the face of change than 'wisdom'. With a slight shift in context, the learning becomes no longer directly applicable. It is not an accident that we make the distinction between 'book learning' and 'life experience'.

One of the common issues with arcs is that people burn out on them rapidly, rarely desiring to experience them more than once. It is possible to give arcs a bit more staying power by stringing them together serially in a sequence of arcs. This is a pretty proven technique and is at the base of the majority of commercial attempts to give content arcs longer retention. Businesses that rely on a constant sequence of arcs to bring in ongoing revenue often find themselves running along the content treadmill. If you stop producing content, the business fails.

Any loop can be superficially described as a series of arcs with one arc for each pass you make through the loop. This is an expanded loop. This is useful for recording a particular play-through, however it tells you little about the possibility space described by the loops. Where loops often describe a statistical spectrum of outcomes, the arc notation describes only a single sample.

Mixing Loops and Arcs

Since both loops and arcs can be easily nested and connected to one another, in practice you end up with chemistry-like mixtures of the two that can get a bit messy to tease apart. The simplest method of analysis is to ask "What repeats and what does not?"

Narrative games are the most common example of mixing loops and arcs. A simple combination might involve layering a segment where the player is engaged with loops with a segments of arcs. This is your typical cutscene-gameplay-cutescene sandwich.

However, the analysis can get far more detailed. For example:

Parallel Arcs: You can treat the emotional payload of song as an arc that plays in parallel to the looping gameplay.
Levels: The spatial arc of navigating a level provides context for exploring variations on a central gameplay loop. The 'Golden Path' in a single player level is really just another name for an arc.
Micro Parallel Arcs: A game like Half Life combines both levels and parallel arcs to deliver snippets of evocative stimuli as you progress through the level.

These structures also exist in traditional media. For example, if you look at a traditionally arc-based form such as a book, you find an odd outlier in the form of the Bible. At one level of analysis it can be seen as a story arc that you read through and finish. However, it is embedded in a much larger set of loops we casually refer to as a religion. The game-like loops include everything from worship rituals to the mining of the Bible in order to synthesize weekly sermons. The arc is a central rule book for a larger game consisting primarily of loops.

In the past I've discussed criticism as a game that attempts to revisit an arc repeatedly and embellish it with additional meaning. The game is to generate essays superficially based on some piece of existing art. In turn, other players generate additional essays based off the first essays. This acts as both a referee mechanism and judge. Score is accumulated via reference counts and by rising through an organization hierarchy. It is a deliciously political game of wit that is both impenetrable to outsiders and nearly independent of the actual source arcs. Here creating an arc becomes a move in the larger game. Intriguingly, tabletop roleplaying games use a similar core structure though the high level rewards differ.

Even in these complex cases, understanding which behavior is a loop and which is an arc helps tease apart the systemic behaviors. Of the two, loops are rarely discussed in any logical fashion. People note the arcs and comment on them at length while being quite blind to the loops driving the outcomes. Both criticism and religions are lovely examples of how loop analysis can provide a practical description of the game's ruleset and magic circle even when the actual players are only vaguely aware of their constraints.

The growth of arcs in games

In the pre-computer era, games dealt almost entirely with loops. The light arcs that games like Chess or Monopoly contained served the highly functional purpose of triggering a player's mental schema. Once that setup payload was delivered, the games focused almost entirely on loops. One could easily claim that historically the term 'game' was used to describe an entertainment made predominantly of loops.

With the advent of computer games, designers started mixing more arcs with their loops. Adventure games, game endings and other narrative elements became more prevalent. There are strong cultural and economic reason why this occurred at this period of time that are not strictly an inherent function of the computer game medium.

The primary driver for the proliferation of arc-based games is that they fit nicely into the existing retail business model. Over the past 40-years, the dominant way you made money off media was to sell the customer an arc, be it a book, an album or a movie. Once they had consumed that, you sold them another one. With a large enough portfolio of games (typically managed by a publisher), you'd get a reliable stream of revenue.

As is the case with evolutionary systems, certain ill-fitting forms of games were punished financially and thus faded from the market. Assume you tried to build a popular evergreen game. You sell it once and that is the only money you get for the rest of the consumer's life. The retailers didn't want that outcome. Nor did the publishers. They preferred to sell players multiple games a year, year after year. The developers that made games that fit the constraints of this specific market reality flourished with profits from mega hits used to fund future moon launches. Many of the modern game tropes such as beatable games, sequels, game concept conveyable by box covers, etc are a direct result this early retail environment.

Again, this is a statistical process, not a conspiracy. Mammals and dinosaurs coexisted for millions of year but the shifting climate ended up being more amendable to one form than the other. During the retail era, evergreen games still existed, but in diminished quantities.

Since systems are hard to understand, one popular just-so story that emerged during this period that arc-heavy games are some ideal outcome of new computer technology. This matured into a strange arc-worshipping segment of the population that predicts a technology-driven singularity for games that involves ever richer payloads and an eventual acceptance as an equal of other arc-centric media. Someone like David Cage, maker of Heavy Rain, is a modern example of such ideals. But the roots go back much further to the dreams of early science fiction writers and researchers that had little practical experience with creating games. They sold us a delightful dream for the future of games without understanding the first thing about the actual loop-like nature of games.

On reflection, it seems quite false to claim computers enabled arc-heavy gaming. A choose-your-own adventure was technologically feasible a hundred years ago. This suggests that arc-heavy games are not nearly as inevitable as some might imagine.

Consider the arcade market with its very different business requirements. The arcade owners, publishers and developers were less interested in selling consumable boxes and more interested in repeat play. This business constraint encouraged the creation of evergreen loop-based games that thrived for decades. The market and the culture hugely shapes the form of the games we make. It is certainly not locked in stone.

The market is shifting once again. With in-app purchases, there is a large financial benefit to keeping the player engaged both emotionally and financially for long periods of time. A fit game is one that you play forever all while paying for your hobby. It is not one you beat and cast aside. This suggests that loop-heavy games may be making a comeback.

Untangling loops and arcs in existing game forms

So how do we evolve our designs with the market environment? One exercise I've been performing on various games is identifying loop and arcs in a popular genre and then removing the arcs to see if what is left stands on its own. What I've discovered is that arcs are almost never critical game elements. You can remove them and still have a playable game.

As an exercise, take your favorite genre (such as platform games) and remove the following:

Puzzles
Missions
Narrative sequences that are not specifically functional feedback that powers the completion of a loop.

To take this one step further, remove any elements of a computer game that you can 'beat' or that render the game boring or meaningless upon repeated play.

Can you make a wonderful game out of the remaining bones? The vast majority of the time you can. Even deeply arc-heavy graphical adventure games yield procedural hidden object games at their root. Now, you can never get rid of arcs completely, nor would you want to. Loops and arcs are ingredients and the goal is to create a new recipe with different mix rather than unquestioningly recreated the same meal again and again.

A brilliant future for loops

However, this is admittedly a rather reductive exercise. What I'm far more interested in is what happens when we, as designers and developers, invest our full energy in exploring the potential of loops. The language here is far less developed and it is an extremely fertile field for a young developer to make their mark. Consider the following sparely settled frontiers:

Both Will Wright and Notch made millions by exploring the loops of player expression.
Eve forges forth into new territory with every update by exploring the loops of economics and politics.
Star Craft thrives because it taps into the mastery loops at the competitive heart of sports.
No one is even talking about the loops inherent in religion, a system that has driven the behavior of humanity for thousands of years.
Games of improv or bluffing or charades are all loop-based activities with nearly zero traction in the markets today. These are games that can be played for life.

Conclusion

Look for loops and arcs in your game. What is the balance between the two elements in your design? What does your game need?

This isn't a black and white situation and I respectfully ask you to avoid couching this in any tired us vs them terminology. There is not one market. You may find that the traditional arc-heavy recipes are exactly what you need. If you are selling to a community whose norms for buying games were set during the retail era, creating a great beatable payload of entertainment may make you a lot of money. Many of the popular indie sales channels remain conservative recreations of markets past. It is a well trodden path.

Author evocative arcs
Build sequels
Reduce portfolio risk in order to survive long droughts between mega hits

If you are making a more modern evergreen game, consider how loops may result in delivering long term value to the players. Question the forms of a traditional game and ask yourself if they are still valid in today's market.

Invent dynamic loops
Build a hobby
Create a fortified island nation with an ongoing stream of revenue.

This is admittedly the harder path. You need to analyze your design preconceptions. You need to understand the psychological functionality of what you are building something instead of merely mimicking patterns of the last generation. Break your game down into loops and arcs. Understand what is filler. Understand what core elements form a endless engine for generating value (be it 'fun' or your outcome of choice.)

Above all, evolve.

take care,
Danc.

Giving a talk at plague stricken GDC 2012 on sexy-sexy innovation

2012-03-01T20:15:00.000-08:00

It is that time of year when I bodysurf the sweating developer crowds in San Francisco and inevitably contract to some horrible nerd-specific viral infection. Current theory: Never touch the glasses. The past three years have resulted in the entire week of GDC being a blur of fever and fatigue-induced hallucinations interspersed with violently explosive sneezing fits. Here's to GDC 2012: Reliving Twelve Monkeys for the fourth year in a row.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, I'll be giving a talk on game design. David, who somehow manages to thrive on the additional contact with humanity, is doubling down on two talks. His immune system must be made of titanium. Alternatively, I hear if you eat a school teacher at the first sign of illness, you double the effectiveness of Cold-Eeze. No wonder there is a teacher shortage. I blame GDC.

Here's my plan. I'm just going to stand on some stage, deep in a fog of over-the-counter drugs and say something, anything. Last year, people looked like rhubarb-colored elephants. I hope my mouth movements makes sense to the mysterious minds behind those enormous loxodontal ears. I never watch the videos afterwards so I'm blissfully ignorant of the actual outcome.

Realm of the Counter-Intuitive God (SOGS Postmortem)
SPEAKER/S: David Edery (Spry Fox)
Monday 11:15-12:15 Room 135, North Hall
Social and Online Games Summit / 60-Minute Lecture
Description: Realm of the Mad God is a web-based f2p MMO with a penchant for breaking rules. It’s a MMO bullet-hell-shooter… in Flash. It is based on open source art. It features permadeath (the ultimate in retention challenges)! And it just so happens to be surprisingly popular and very profitable. This lecture will review some of the unusual design and business choices we made and explore which worked, which didn’t, and why. Financial and other data will be shared (and not just the stuff that makes us look good).

Create New Genres (and Stop Wasting Your Life in the Clone Factories)
SPEAKER/S: Daniel Cook (Spry Fox)
Tuesday 3:00-4:00 Room 135, North Hall
Social and Online Games Summit / 60-Minute Lecture
Description: Re-releasing old designs with pretty new graphics means me-too titles fighting off a crowd of similar products. This is the path to mediocrity. To become a master designer, you need to break past a slavish devotion of past forms and create vibrant, new experiences. This design talk covers practical techniques for reinventing game genres. The goal is the invention of a unique and highly differentiated customer value proposition that makes both strong business sense and is also deeply creatively fulfilling. We cover designing from the root, reducing design risk, and igniting original franchises. We also cover the pitfalls of design innovation including fending off shark-like fast followers and other cloners. The presentation covers personal examples from recent titles such as Steambirds, Realm of the Mad God, Triple Town and other innovative successes.

How F2P Games Blur the Line Between Design and Business
SPEAKER/S: Soren Johnson (Game Developer Magazine), Ben Cousins (ngmoco Sweden), Matthias Worch (LucasArts), Tom Chick (Quarter to Three) and David Edery (Spry Fox)
Friday 4:00-5:00 Room 2003, West Hall, 2nd Fl
60-Minute Panel
The free-to-play movement is here to stay and will touch every corner of the games industry. However, the format blurs the line between game design and game business, so that business decisions will become increasingly indistinguishable from design decisions. Free-to-play content must be fun enough to attract and retain players but not so much fun that no one feels the need to spend some money. Managing this tension makes free-to-play design extremely difficult, especially for traditional game designers who are used to simply making the best game possible. Our panelists will discuss this transition and best practices for building free-to-play games with soul.

See you there.
Danc.

Standing up for ourselves

2012-01-29T08:00:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you need to stand up for yourself, or you're just begging to be taken advantage of.

We (Spry Fox) have filed a copyright infringement suit in federal court against 6Waves LOLAPPS in response to their release of Yeti Town, their blatant copy of Triple Town. This was a difficult decision for David and I. We are not enthusiastic about the prospect of spending our time in court as opposed to making games. And in general, we believe that only in the most extreme circumstances should a video game developer resort to legal action in order to defend their creative works — the last thing our industry needs is frivolous lawsuits. Unfortunately, it is our opinion that 6waves has behaved in a reprehensible and illegal manner, and we can not, in good conscience, ignore it.

The full legal complaint can be downloaded here. In particular, I will call attention to these issues:

First: Yeti Town, as launched by 6waves, was a nearly perfect copy of Triple Town. We’re not just talking about the game’s basic mechanics here. We’re talking about tons of little details, from the language in the tutorial, to many of our UI elements, to the quantities and prices of every single item in the store (how exactly did 6waves “independently” decide to price 200 turns for 950 coins, or 4 wildcards for 1500 coins each? That’s quite a coincidence!) But don’t take our word for it. Here are just a few quotes taken from the numerous press articles that were published shortly after the release of Yeti Town:

Gamezebo: "Unfortunately for Yeti Town, the only substantial difference between it and Facebook’s Triple Town is the platform it's on. Otherwise it’s the exact same game, only this time with snow."
InsideSocialGames: "Yeti Town is a matching game nearly identical to Spry Fox’s Triple Town"
Games.com: "Replace "saplings" with "bushes", "tents" with "houses" and "yetis" with "bears". What do you get? Something that would look a lot like independent developer Spry Fox's Triple Town"

Second: what most people don’t know is that 6waves was in confidential (under NDA) negotiations with us to publish Triple Town at the exact same time that they were actively copying Triple Town. We gave 6waves private access to Triple Town when it was still in closed beta, months before the public was exposed to the game. We believed those negotiations were ongoing, and we continued to give private information to 6waves, until 6waves’ Executive Director of Business Development sent us a message via Facebook on the day Yeti Town was published in which he suddenly broke off negotiations and apologized for the nasty situation. His message can be found in its entirety in the body of our legal complaint.

It’s bad enough to rip off another company. To do so while you are pumping them for private information (first, our game design ideas, and later, after the game was launched on Facebook, our private revenue and retention numbers) is profoundly unethical by any measure.

Despite all this, David and I still struggled with the idea of initiating a lawsuit. However, 6waves brought the issue to a head when, rather than openly and honestly discuss their actions, they had the chutzpah to tell Gamasutra that they had developed Yeti Town completely independently, and characterized the legitimate public criticism of their company as simply “part of the natural process” of game development.

We believe that there is nothing “natural” or ethical or legal about 6waves behavior. What they did was wrong. And if they get away with it, it will simply encourage more publishers to prey on independent game developers like us. We refuse to sit back and let that happen.

-Dave & Danc

The Real Triple Town available on iOS and Android

2012-01-19T14:56:00.000-08:00

The holidays were crazy. Instead of opening presents, we were putting the finishing touches on the mobile version of Triple Town. Some late nights all around. Big kudos to Cliff Owen for doing an immense amount of the heavy lifting.

Triple Town for iPhone and iPad
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/triple-town/id490532168?ls=1&mt=8

Triple Town for Android
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.spryfox.tripletown

If you love Triple Town, please download it (it is free) and rate it. We are in a bit of a David and Goliath situation here since a very large and nasty company copied Triple Town on mobile right at the end of December. We're a small team and we work hard, but moving to the phone took a few precious months. I don't quite know how to express the feeling of bleeding our lives out trying to finish the game...all while watching a soulless shark lavishly spend VC cash to ride up the chart. Using my own design. That was like a punch in the gut. Betrayal, violation and powerlessness all wrapped up into one unpleasant emotion. This has easily been one of the most emotionally difficult releases I've ever done.

To add insult to injury, the night we got ready to upload the Android version we made an awkward discovery: There was already a game called Triple Town being sold by a certain Mr. WangYang. In fact, it was Triple Town. The art was ripped from the web version. The logo was the same. Check out that screenshot...captured for posterity. I want to send big thank you to Google. Even though their offices had closed for the night, they took down the fake immediately. That was deeply appreciated.

Ripped off: An example of a counterfeit game.

The best and most positive thing anyone who loves innovative indie games can do is spread the word about the original. Share the link. Download Triple Town. Write a review. Tell your friends. Heck, I tell strangers in coffee shops.

No one ever complains since a good indie game is an authentic joy. The next time I see someone after introducing them to Triple Town, all they ever want to talk about is Triple Town. It becomes an essential part of their life. It doesn't matter that it was done by a few guys working out of home offices. All that matters is that it is a good, original game that players love. I figure the Fast Follower bastards may have money and evil on their side, but maybe a passionate community and some word of mouth about a decent game can carve a small space for the little guys.

Big thanks for all the continued requests asking us to make Triple Town for mobile. It kept me going.

take care,
Danc.

PS: Also a lot of folks told me they just wanted to 'buy the damned thing'. So even though the game is still free if you want, you can now pay once and get unlimited turns.

PPS: First game in Unity! Very nice!

Plagiarism as a moral choice

2011-11-16T18:44:00.001-08:00

Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous boundaries.

The modern concept of plagiarism as immoral and originality as an ideal emerged in Europe only in the 18th century, particularly with the Romantic movement, while in the previous centuries authors and artists were encouraged to "copy the masters as closely as possible" and avoid "unnecessary invention.

The 18th century new morals have been institutionalized and enforced prominently in the sectors of academia and journalism, where plagiarism is now considered academic dishonesty and a breach of journalistic ethics, subject to sanctions like expulsion and other severe career damage...

Plagiarism is not a crime per se but is disapproved more on the grounds of moral offence...
-Wikipedia's entry on Plagiarism

Thought: Most professional game developers are also professional plagiarists

Here's a quiz for all the game developers who are reading:

Do you follow the rule of thumb "90% familiar, 10% fresh"?
When you look at the game you are working on is there a direct comparable?
Do your designers say "For that feature let's model how X did it" and consistently refer to the same pre-existing game?
Is your primary reference a game considered original or innovative in the last 3-5 years?
Is your primary philosophy of design "I could totally make a better version of game X"
Do you copy mechanics and assume that adding different content such as levels or graphics makes your game unique?

If you follow these patterns, you are likely a plagiarist. To rewrite the industry's golden rule in the language of other arts, "90% is plagiarized and 10% is remixed to give the illusion that the player is engaged in an original work."

This lazy and morally offensive practice has become a social norm within our incestuous industry. We don't even consider that there might be alternative method of developing games. We are the equivalent of the western world before the suffrage movement. Or the South before the civil rights movement. We look at our current derivative behavior, acknowledge that it is harmful and then proceed to dogmatically justify its continued pursuit based off economic, legal, historical and short-term selfish reasons. Yet the fact that 'everyone does it' fails to provide a strong moral foundation for an act that diminishes our industry and damages the minority that strive to create original works.

Where plagiarism differs from evolving key innovations of the past

It is a common practice to include individual mechanics inspired by previous games. This is a natural part of the creative process. Plagiarists, however borrows systems en mass. They takes not just the movement mechanic from Zelda, but the flow of the dungeons, the majority of the power ups, and the millisecond by millisecond feel of the game.

Game designs are very close to a mechanical invention. The rules, interface and feedback systems all create a reproducible set of player dynamics. Think of a game as an invented 'fun engine' that when placed in front of a player yields delight and mastery.

Developers go through a few stages of invention when building games.

Copying a design. Most programmers make a simple copy of an existing functional game as part of their learning process. You copy everything including interface, levels, scoring and more. You don't understand why the game works so you replicate it in the hopes of blindly capturing the magic. You may change out the art, but otherwise it is the same game.
Modifying an existing design. Usually this involves just playing with existing parameters or content. You might add a a triple shotgun and new levels to your Doom-clone. You still don't understand the game, but you can play with safe variables like narrative, level design or theme that are unlikely to ruin the value of the core mechanic. Warcraft is a classic example of a modification of the original Dune 2 RTS design.
Adding to a design. Taking the core fun engine and add something to it. Think of this as adding a turbo charger on an existing car. Sonic took Mario and made the main character much faster. In the best games this results in a cascade effect throughout the entire design that requires you to rethink content, pacing, scoring and more.
Synthesizing a new design. Take multiple disparate parts and put together a new game that has unique dynamics. A game like PuzzleJuice is a great example of a synthesized design that takes elements from Tetris and Boggle. To many players, it feels like a brand new games built out of familiar pieces.
Inventing a design. Using a variety of sources of inspiration, create a new fun engine that is unique and new to the world.

The early stages of copying are an essential process that all students of game design should undertake. As a learning activity, there isn't a lot of money in creating master studies, but it is a respectable pursuit along the path to self improvement. As long as students cite their inspiration and refrain from competing directly with the original creator there is little conflict.

The later stages of invention are risky, difficult work. There's an immense amount of experimentation and failure. Even the simplest game inventions (such as Tetris or Lemmings) were the result of years of diligent labor by master designers. There aren't a lot of these people, yet they bring immense amounts of joy to the world. They deserve to profit from their inventions and in general players are excited to spend their money on new, delightful games.

The plagiarist is someone who wants to shortcut the process of invention. They decide that it is cheaper to copy as much a possible so that the dynamics of a previous game are preserved. Then cosmetic tweaks are applied and the copy is sold as a new thing by an original creator. Changing out the graphics or giving the game a new plot are the most common tweaks because they are easily decoupled without damaging the delicate dynamics of play. When you look at the games released on the market, you can easily see that there is a spectrum of theft. The most blatant plagiarists are those that steal the most and innovate new mechanics and dynamics the least.

The economic and human cost of plagiarism

By cheaply creating games without needing to pay the cost of research and invention, plagiarists are able to quickly release games into markets that the original innovator has not fully addressed. Clones therefore capture value that would have otherwise eventually accrued to the original innovator. For example, clones of Minecraft that reach XBLA earlier tap unmet demand and reduce the audience for Minecraft when it eventually releases there.

On first blush, consumer advocates might imagine that this is a fine situation. They get a product they like faster and as the population of plagiarists merrily plagiarize one another, you end up with an explosion of quality choices.

Consider how this effects the original source of the innovation. While the overall market may be larger, the original innovator is left naked with no protection that lets them recoup the cost of the initial invention. There are few legal protections for game inventors. There is only the stark reality that many smaller independent developers, the life blood of innovation in our current markets, are blindsided by a blast of competition that they lack the development resources, distribution agreements or business expertise to successfully compete against. The plagiarists capture the majority of the market, establish well known evergreen brands and the original innovators are at best a footnote.

As a result of this tragically common feedback loop, those inclined to innovate are discouraged from innovating in the first place. Why innovate when it costs you money and doesn't yield the competitive advantage you might hope due to the nearly instantaneous influx of copy-cat competitors? It may look like a better business option to simply join the plagiarists and avoid the whole expensive innovation thing in the first place. It is no surprise that the game industry tends to have a large number of evolutionary works, but fewer genre-busting founder works.

The plagiarist's 'make a buck at any cost' attitude directly results in a creatively stagnant industry long term. You don't need to look far to see concrete examples of these dynamics in action. Note how quickly the cartoonishly mercenary plagiarism-focused culture of social games turned a bright spot of burgeoning innovation into an endless red ocean of clone after clone within a mere handful of years. Such a wasteland fails to grow the market and ultimately leads to less consumer choice.

Plagiarist pride

There is of course skill in plagiarizing well, just as there is skill in forging a famous painting. To be a professional plagiarist is laborious work. I acknowledge this. We've developed a whole subculture of designers that specialize in the subtle arts of copying the work of others. A 'good designer' is one that excels at 'researching comparable games'. They steal with great care from only the best. They also excel at 'polish' which has been warped to mean the skill at reverse engineering a comparable game so that the copy feels identical down to the smallest detail.

The current industry put such skills on a pedestal. We hire for them and we pay top dollar for reliable execution. Yet at best, these are the skills of a journeyman, mechanically copying the master works of past giants.

If you stick to doing only this, there's a pretty clear career path. You end up as a wage slave. Typically such laborers are hired by businesses that couldn't give a damn about pushing the craft of game design forward. Instead, the goal is another product for another slot on either the retail shelf or the downloadable dashboard. Grind it out, worker bee. If you can copy a past hit by the flickering candle of midnight crunch, your family gets its ball of rice for the day. This is the entirety of your creative worth. If you go to sleep each night thinking "I'm a hack, but at least I pay the bills", you deserve pity. And you need to contemplate the quiet whisper that maybe you don't need to spend your entire career diligently copying others. Remember when you were a sparklingly original creative person? Remember when you wanted to change the world? Remember that time before you compromised?

Plagiarism is a moral choice

We live in an economic world. Yes, you need to eat. We also live in a legal world. There is a rather low minimum bar for our behavior. But as creators and artists, we can each choose where we put our creative energy. What we create has a moral and emotional component that is perhaps more important for both our mental health than any paycheck. To be a plagiarist and to stay a plagiarist is to waste your very limited time on this planet. What amazing things could you be making if you didn't spend so much time slavishly copying others?

What's the alternative? Why not start up a small prototyping project? Knock a genre down to its most basic element. Give yourself constraints so you intentionally do not replicate games of the past. Rebuild your game from that simple foundation, borrowing elements from the entire breadth of game history. Finish a game that has a half dozen influences from widely disparate games that in the end create a player experience that is uniquely yours. This is how you stop being a plagiarist and start becoming a master game designer. There is still time to create something amazing and new.

take care,
Danc.

Useful links

Inspiration vs. Imitation: http://www.jessicahische.is/obsessedwiththeinternet/andbeingresponsivelyinspired/inspiration-vs-imitation-2

Panda Poet: My most social design

2011-10-31T12:04:00.000-07:00

Way back in 2010, Spry Fox put out a single player word game for the Kindle called Panda Poet. I had always had some vague ideas for a multiplayer variation so when an opportunity came up to create an original HTML 5 game, I pitched play-by-mail Panda Poet. As David says over on his blog, this is our third release this month so things have been a wee bit hectic. Reminder to self: do not launch multiple new games while attempting to vacation in Japan.

As with all my projects, we spent the first few months heavily iterating on prototype designs. I went back to the root of the original concept and ended up deviating substantially from the single player mechanics. The game still involves growing pandas by spelling words. But now the game is based around a capture mechanism that lets you take pandas from the other player. The territory aspects of the game give play a rather unique feel and the end result reminds me of "Scrabble meets Go." The timer countdowns that were such a large part of the single player game are gone. Playing against another player who constantly creates words out of any letters you didn't use ends up being more than enough pressure to give the game forward momentum. The arrow of play is strong in this one.

Go give Panda Poet a try over at game.pandapoet.com. Or install it on the Chrome Web Store. Invite a friend to play. It is more fun.

Putting the social into a game

Most multiplayer games played over the computer aren't very social. In console games, you get a lot of teabagging and swearing with very little space or time set aside for meaningful social dialog. In games on social networks, you find people poking one another using cynically automated systems. There's a pushy one-to-many broadcast aspect of the experience that does little to encourage deeper social bonds.

My wife is a longtime player of Words with Friends and seeing her chatting with complete strangers for months on end reignited my interest in play-by-mail games. You can think of these games as a bit like a conversation. You make a statement by playing a turn and then pass the conversation onto the next person so they can respond. Side by side with the game is a chat window, but the important realization is that both the chat and the moves you make in the game are forms of communication.

Panda Poet follows a similar model. It has an inbox, just like an email program and you can have multiple conversations going at once. Here are some observations:

Every interaction is opt-in: Everytime you choose to make a move, you are signaling that you want to continue the relationship. There's little penalty for dropping out.
Relationships grow over time: Many random matches put strangers together. Initially, people play silently for long stretches of time. However, very slowly you get the occasional safe comment. Eventually this blossoms into more detailed conversations. Trust comes from a long series of safe and reliable interactions. Each time you submit a turn, you are building trust and respect.
Griefing is difficult: If someone is rude, you just resign from the game and stop playing with them. Or you don't play the next turn. It is possible to spam someone, but number of people effected is so minimal and the feedback in response to your Killer cleverness so sparse that it is rarely worth it. The typical incentives driving griefing fizzle without an audience or social status.
You can build on existing relationships: When was the last time you did any activity with your brother or close friend from college that now lives a thousand miles away? We live in social world fractured by Schumpeter's creative destruction. You dwell in distant lands as determined by the latest job opening. As a result, the deeply meaningful local relationships that dominated life of eras past suffer. Social isolation is a very real consequence of the capitalist eradication of that most charming of labor rigidities, a generational home. Games like Panda Poet give you a private shared space to reconnect. Take five minutes out of your day and create a new experience with the ones you once held near.

I see immense potential in this style of game and I'll be using similar multiplayer structures in future games. When you design a game with real social play, ask "What is the intrinsic rhythm of back and forth conversation between participants?" If this key pattern has no space to exist, then perhaps you aren't creating a social game after all.

take care,
Danc.

Other Notes

Successes

Easy initial learning curve: People get that you are supposed to spell words. There doesn't seem to be much confusion over the basic UI.
The game is reasonably well balanced. I've seen multiple games between two skilled players that are decided based off the final few words. You almost never find yourself halfway through the game in a position where it is impossible to make a comeback.
Pacing: I'm adore the short play sessions (a single turn takes 10-30 seconds). However, since players can have multiple games going, you get a random distribution of games popping up throughout the day much like email or an IM conversation with a friend. This combined with a daily email archive prompting people to check back into the site and catch up on waiting games should yield a reasonably high rate of retention.

Our big challenges going forward:

Complex capture mechanics: The capture mechanics are a dash too complex for casual players to understand the strategic elements of the game immediately. In particular, it takes multiple games for players to understand how to lock in pandas mid game.
Poor monetization opportunities: Right now there's just an initial Premium version that removes ads and gives access to a more expansive and strategic board layout. My suspicion is that we are going to need to do a lot more work to craft a compelling offer.

Steambirds: Survival Mobile

2011-10-12T19:26:00.000-07:00

Today, we are launching Steambirds Survival for iOS. The layout has been rejiggered to work nicely on the iPhone. And there's a wonderfully expansive HD version for the iPad that it easily my favorite way to play Steambirds. The Android version will follow shortly. All of them are free, so give it a go and let me know what you think.

Though this new mobile version of Steambirds Survival shares the same name as web-based game, by partnering with Halfbrick (of Fruit Ninja fame) we've transformed it into a much bigger (and my opinion, better) game.

Improved progression system with new missions: There are 64 missions, 8 of which are infinite survival modes. If you liked Steambirds and want to play it forever, this is your game. (Sometimes you need something a bit meatier than a tiny handful of puzzle levels.)
Free-to-play: This is our first free-to-play game on mobile. Like most of our games, we take the 'free' part pretty seriously. I want people to buy because they love the game and can't get enough. I'm very curious what lessons we'll learn.
Multiple player planes: We added a really fun recruitment system that lets you hire multiple player controlled planes. Running through a level with three Chickadees feels amazing. Previously lackluster planes like the Cockroach turn into fascinating exercises in multi-plane tactics.
New Reinforcement powerup: You can call in NPC allies to fight along side. This leads to rather epic mix ups with dozens of planes pinwheeling about in a deadly dance.

Does your game have a clear "Arrow of Play"?

After launching the web version of Steambirds Survival, I was unhappy with the mission structure. Originally there was an open list of planes that you could unlock in any order. It seemed like a good idea at the time since 'openness' and 'choice' are good, right? But we saw that a lot of players would cherry pick a few planes and then after they found one that they liked, they'd just play that plane to grind the in-game currency, copper. As a result, the progression lacked a clear feeling of momentum that encouraged you to trying out a wide variety of different play styles.

With the new mission structure, you unlock cities one at a time and each city reveals more cities to play. Within each city, there are 8 sub-missions that give the player to demonstrate increasing levels of mastery to pass. Now, there's a very clear direction to the unlocking and this should give players short term and long term goals to work towards.

In physics, Arthur Eddington coined the phrase 'arrow of time' to describe how time appears to flow in a single direction. As you dabble in general relativity, you realize that time is wonderfully compressible and can be manipulated in a variety of clever ways, especially near the speed of light. Yet even with all this variation, it consistently advances forward.

When I look at a design, I always ask "What is the arrow of play?" This is a directional property of the mechanical systems that always moves the player forward. And like time, there's often a surprisingly amount of variation that occurs along the way. Some players advance slowly, others take strange side paths, but all advance.

Tools for creating the arrow of play

In Steambirds Survival, there are a variety of systems that result in a distinct arrow of play.

Inevitable decay: Plane health almost always goes downward. There are very rare health boosts, but they are at best a temporary reprieve.
Escalation: Enemies slowly increase over time. Waves get larger. Difficult enemies spawn with increased frequency. Even the best players find themselves at a point where they can't fight back the chaos any longer and errors creep in.
Short term goals: Short term, you are trying to live long enough to complete mission goals that are just on the edge of your capabilities.
Repeated patterns: Each mission goal unlocks new mission goals. Once you learn the pattern you can repeat it again and again building momentum like train wheels accelerating down the track.
Resource flow: Each goal you complete earns you copper, which you spend to either facilitate the completion of goals or to unlock new cities. There is a clear resource flow from sources of currency to sinks of currency.
Limited choices: Unlocking new cities in turn lets you unlock more cities, eventually getting to the point where you have explored all the content in the game. At once point in my career I thought linearity was a curse. And it is when taken to extremes. But it is also a tool. If you end up overwhelming most players with too many choices, the perceived quality of the choices provides goes down. In Steambirds Survival, there are always at least 4 choices. You can unlock up two cities. Or you can attempt missions in at least two cities. The hope is that it is clear what to do next.
Linear affordances: The map of cities is a simple list that scrolls in along one dimension. Should I have made a map that scrolls in two dimensions? I could have, but I'm not sure it would have improved the quality of the choices that the player made. Instead, by restricting the dimensionality of the UI, the player can focus on picking a city instead of wandering around a map, trying to remember which corner the next locked item is located at. (I learned this lesson from map scrolling in Lemmings. One of my favorite tools for simplify interfaces)

Games are about change. The system moves from one state to another at the poking and prodding of the players. Each tick of the clock or press of a button creates momentum that leads the player on a joyful rush through challenge after mastery challenge. You start slowly. The player builds speed and eventually they steam forward in a continuous state of flow. The arrow of play leads inevitably to a sense of pacing. Yet critically it approaches these not from a traditional narrative perspective, but as a property of the game systems. The beats of the game rhythm are those clicks and taps turning tight loops over and over. Steambirds is a turn-based strategy game, a genre typically seen as a slow and plodding. Yet in the middle of a dog fight, it can feel like an action game.

A system that lacks a clear arrow of play results in players being mired in odd dead ends. It isn't enough to make a game that has feedback loops, widgets to master and all the various atomic elements of a game. It also needs a strong sense of momentum that like time or entropy hurtles the play forward.

take care,
Danc.

Triple Town Beta (Now with Bears)

2011-10-03T08:22:00.000-07:00

Exciting times. You can now play our puzzle game Triple Town in your web browser. We are releasing it as a beta and the game should evolve quite substantially over time. Huge kudos to Cristian Soulos for making this project blossom after a long winter. You can play it here.

Triple Town is a special game. It has the highest user rating of any of the games I've designed (94%). It is also the only one of my designs that I go back to again and again. Why is this?

On the surface, it is a simple match-3 variant, but after a few games you'll start noticing the strategic depth. The pacing is...uncommon. There's a relaxed mellow rhythm to the game where you casually make dozens of micro decisions. Yet these decisions add up to games that can last upwards of a week for advanced players. After a while you realize you are playing the Civilization of Match-3 games and that you care deeply about what you are building. That burst of strong emotion always surprises me.

The big addition for this release? Bears.

Bears, bears everywhere

Triple Town helped solidify how I construct the world and setting in my games. My inclination is to look for ways of supporting the emotions inherent in the game dynamics. If you've ever played the Kindle version, the design is a rather abstract puzzle game with highly symbolic tokens and mechanical rules. It has only the briefest of settings. Yet as I played the game and watched other play, I realized that it evoked an intense spectrum of emotions. Here were some of the ones that I noticed:

Pride: When you create a great city, you want to share it. People take screenshots. They brag. Pride in what they've built is the primary emotion that drives players of Triple Town.
Curiosity: You want to know what the next item looks like. Some people are driven to get a castle for the first time.
Hate: You learn to hate the teleporting Ninjas. They never attack you, but they end up blocking your plans.
Sadness: You have slight sadness the first time you kill a bear. Then you learn to steel yourself against the emotion.
Irritation: When fate gives you the wrong piece at the wrong time.
Competition: When you notice that your friends are doing better than you.
Despair: When you feel the board closing in and realize that you can't possible catch up to your friends.
Relief: When the board is filling up and then you perform a miraculous move that empties a swath of the board and helps you start afresh.

Games are great at eliciting primary emotions. They don't need the Hero's Journey, they don't need story, they don't need hyper realistic visuals with immersive first person cameras. You can create an emotional, deeply meaningful experience simply by using the fundamentals of system design.

(You can read a bit more on the theory of how games are unique suited to creating emotional experiences in my previous essay on Shadow Emotions and Primary Emotions. I include a small section at the end of this essay on the OCC emotion model that fits nicely with my process. Thanks, Aki!)

Tuning emotions

When I revisited the Triple Town design, the emotions were already clearly evident. However, I wanted to explore how I could more directly shape those emotions to fit my vision of the game.

Emotions are complex to say the least so we need some sort of entry into the topic. There's a general consensus that you can divide emotions into rough categories. For example 'negative feelings toward others.' Then within those rough categories, you see variations that we recognize as distinct emotions. For example, hate and irritation are actually highly related and are typically related to a sense of loss or constraint caused by others. As a designer, how do I push the conditions that elicit a general class of emotion so that I can dial in the emotional variant that I desire?

There are a variety of theories. In Triple Town, I was influenced by the two factor theory of emotion and the somatic marker theory. Like many aspects of human cognition, multiple inputs are necessary to create the final refined experience. The 'taste' of wine is synthesized out of the actual chemical taste and the perceived quality of the wine. A five dollar wine labeled as a 100 dollar wine can be perceived to taste better than that same wine in it's original bottle. Similarly, we posit that our brain synthesizes most common primary emotions out of the following:

An ambiguous physical response (your adrenaline jumping and your heart rate elevating)
The system-derived context of the situation you are in.
Recalled cognitive labels of related past experiences.

Looking at Triple Town, both the physical response and the system-derived context are very much present. I can experimentally validate that I'm getting strong emotions from the players even using a highly abstract game board. However the cognitive labels are underdeveloped. So this analysis led me to try a particular tactic:

If you can evoke a general class of emotions with game mechanics, then you can apply evocative stimuli to label and therefore tune that response to elicit a specific emotion.

Monsters or children?

Consider a very basic example of labeling in Triple Town. The raw materials I was working with was an observation that players felt immense sense of relief when they killed annoying NPCs. I experimented with applying various labels to see how we could tune the response.

Pass 1: During one early prototype, the NPCs were accidentally displayed as small children. Naturally, players felt bad when trapped them and they turned into grave stones. Accidental deaths led to guilt and sadness while deliberate deaths evoked a dissonant feeling of cruelty.
Pass 2: So next we switched them to evil looking monsters. This was a dramatic change. Now players felt righteous glee when they trapped and killed the monsters.
Pass 3: Finally, during this latest build, I settle on bears that have slightly evil looking eyes. Most players feel fine killing the bears, but for some there is a slight edge of ambiguity that makes them uncomfortable.
Future passes: Now that I've explored the emotional space a little, I've set up the bears so that with one simple tweak of the eyes, I can make the bears incredibly cute and bring back many of the feelings of guilt and sadness.

Evil bear & Good bear cognitive label. One small part of an overall emotional experience

In essence, I was balancing and tuning the player's emotional response. Much like Sid Meier using a binary search ("double it or or cut it by half") to narrow in on the correct setting in his game, I was trying out various extremes to narrow in on the appropriate emotion.

Using evocative imagery is a common enough practice, but in practice the labeling of NPCs is functionally quite different than merely putting up a picture or cut scene of a dead child. The bear is not an image for the sake of being an image. Instead you create a distinct label that is only meaningful due to how it builds upon an emotional foundation derived from play. Without the mechanics, you just have a picture of a bear. With the mechanics setting the context and providing the raw emotional reactions, you craft a carefully refined emotional moment.

Avoiding dissonance

With the children images in the first pass, I saw an example of dissonance. It is easy to add a poorly fitted label that confuses the emotions the mechanics are eliciting.

The heart of Triple Town are the strong feelings of pride and accomplishment. These comes directly from the rather amazing investment in extended tactical play that the player exerts when creating their 6x6 city. A well crafted city can represent hours of carefully considered labor.

In the Kindle version of the game, I used the sort of end game tropes that you find in Tetris or Bejeweled. You play the game, you get a score and then move onto the next game. Most designers rely on proven fallbacks to get the job done since it is difficult to always be reinventing the wheel.

Unfortunately, this 'obvious' design choice conflicted rather painfully with the slow and steady building of pride. There comes a point at which the player presses a button and in the act of creating a new game, erases all their hard earned progress. It is surprisingly how many times I've let the game sit on the last screen, not willing to leave it behind. The label of 'its just a game session that you finish and move on from' didn't fit the emotional response that the other systems were creating.

1st pass: The first attempt at fixing this involved added coins so there is some persistent resource you take with you after each city. That helps a little, but not enough. Coins are merely a resource and players weren't sad because they were losing some simple generic token.
2nd pass: The second attempt involved the ability to flip back and look at your city a last few times before you move on. This was quite effective since it lets the player say goodbye. The emotional dissonance was channeled into an activity that let players come to terms with it at their own pace. This still isn't good enough.

Luckily Triple Town is a service, not a game that gets launched and forgotten. As I design future features, I'm explicitly creating them to amplify the feeling of pride. Fresh in my mind is the lesson that even something as simple as how to end the game involves labeling the context. What if instead of ending the game, you are finishing cities?

Deriving the world's metaphor from gameplay

These individual emotional moments form a unique emotional fingerprint for Triple Town. Due to dissonance, you can't simple apply any theme to this set of dynamic emotions and still end up with an emotionally coherent game. Instead, you want a theme that fits the mechanics like a glove where the emotional beats elicited by the system dynamics have a clear connection with the labels you'd applied.

With Triple Town, as with most of my designs, the theme and metaphor for the world came from watching people play. I would observe and note the emotions and then ask questions about the fundamental nature of the experience that was evolving. Is this a game about exploration? Creation? Building? If it is a game about building, what is a related theme that matches the current unique fingerprint? Are you building real estate? A tomb? What are those NPCs doing if that is the case?

Overly on the nose

After playing many hundreds of hours of Triple Town, I settled upon a metaphor that fit all the nuances of the mechanics. Triple Town is a game about colonization. Consider the following common dynamics and how labels derived from the metaphor tie them together in a coherent setting.

You've been ordered by the empire from across the sea to build a new city on virgin territory.
In the process, natives (depicted as less than human) keep showing up on 'your' land. They never attack you, but they keep preventing you from expanding.
So you push them off to the side. More experienced players create small reservations and pack the natives in as tightly as possible.
Due to overcrowding the natives die off en mass.
You use their bones to build churches and cathedrals.
When particularly difficult natives appear that seek to escape your reservations, you bring out your overwhelming the military might and remove the pest so you can continue with your manifest destiny.

The match between the theme of colonization and emotions of the mechanics was so strong, I tuned it back slightly so it wasn't quite so on the nose. Instead of selecting a recognizable group that suffered under colonization, I made the NPCs into morally ambiguous bears. It would have been very easy to present players with a choices that were obviously black and white where players fall back on pre-learned schema. However, I'm more interested in the edge cases in which a player does something they feel is appropriate and then as time goes on they begin to understand the larger consequences of their actions. At this point in the development of the world, player should naively explore the system and due to the dynamics of game, then form a strong justification of their role as colonists.

What started as an abstract game is slowly but surely turning into a rich world. What is beyond the city walls? Long term, the themes of colonization, imperialism and the impact on native cultures will unfold over a series of planned game expansions. With slight variations in labeling, I should be able to tune in a variety of powerful emotions related to the theme of colonization.

Differences from traditional theme generation

I find this bottom ups, mechanics-centric method of theme generation quite different from a traditional process of storytelling. In a narrative heavy game, I think about characters, plot, or message first and foremost and then attempting to fit supporting gameplay into the mix. Often you pitch the world and characters to a publisher and then are expected to come up with gameplay that fits. Consider the implications of these two popular styles of narrative-first development:

Unique mini-games and puzzles used to support narrative: One extreme example of this is your typical adventure game where instead of a core mechanic, you have a series of plot appropriate puzzles. The emotional aspects of the puzzle (frustration, delight) are only marginally related to the emotional beats of the plot. Also, in order to avoid dissonance with the wide variety of emotional beats that the story requires, the style of the puzzles is switched up on a regular basis. It is hard enough balancing one game, but asking the team to balance dozens of tinier games results in shallow systems throughout. I think of this as chopping up gameplay to fit the story.
Generic gameplay that supports the narrative: A Japanese RPG like Final Fantasy repeatedly uses turn-based tactical combat to illustrate story beats. The time-tested tactical combat system usually produce a handful of primary emotions such as loss, victory, relief, feeling powerful and feeling powerless. No matter what story is being told, the same system is called upon to provide emotional support. Such a pattern avoids dissonance the majority of the time, but then when the plot veers into non-combat area, the dissonance comes back full force. I think of this as telling more story than the gameplay can naturally support.

Some of the most painful design rat-holes I've have ever dug myself into followed these patterns. In one project, I created a world based off finding relics from a post-Singularity civilization (circa 100AD) deep in the Mediterranean. In another, I was overly attached to a set of small bobble-headed creatures. For both, I was afraid to change the world. Instead, I desperately iterated upon new game mechanics, hoping to find one that fit my world better. And I rarely found one. As far as I can tell, creating a compelling new game mechanic is hard and success is unpredictable. Yet creating a functional game world's is surprisingly cheap. Any idiot can copy a working game, toss some pirates on top and call it good.

Now I follow a different philosophy that better reflects these costs. Gameplay comes first and the worldbuilding are flow from the dynamics of play. If, as you iterate upon gameplay you make a rule change that breaks the emotional connection with a particular world, you should feel very comfortable tossing that world aside and starting fresh. Create a world that supports the game, not the other way around.

Conclusion

The amount of theming and world building in Triple Town is still quite light. Those of players used to the extravagant productions that burden a game with an overworked story may not even recognize the labels I've choosen as having an impact on your experience. Yet they do and most players will feel the emotional beats of the game quite clearly.

Nothing I've outlined here is new. The important insight for me has been creating the labels and world for a game as a bottoms up process. You start with the mechanics and then find the labels that fit the emotional beats. From this game play foundation, you build the world.

Enough rambling! Go play Triple Town. It is still a beta so let me know what you think.

take care,
Danc.

References

Play Triple Town!: http://apps.facebook.com/tripletown
Original design essay on Triple Town: http://www.lostgarden.com/2010/10/triple-town-released-for-amazon-kindle.html
Introduction to primary emotions: http://www.lostgarden.com/2011/07/shadow-emotions-and-primary-emotions.html
Games without Frontiers: http://acta.uta.fi/pdf/978-951-44-7252-7.pdf

Cheat sheet: Steps for tuning primary emotions

Here's the process for tuning emotions

Create a playful system.
Observe the emotional reactions of the player within that system.
Adjust the system's emotion eliciting conditions to increase or decrease particular raw emotional reactions.
Once you have a rich set of desired emotional responses, brainstorm natural labels that refine the emotions.
Test the labels and see how they elicit specific emotional variations.
Bundle the labels into a metaphor for your game that communicates and amplifies its unique emotional fingerprint.

Note: OCC Model of emotions

Aki Järvinen's thesis "Games without Frontiers" (pdf) pointed me towards a fascinating model of emotion by Ortony, Clore and Collins (OCC). It posits that emotional outcomes are tied to systemic variables. For example the strength of a player's dissapointment would be tied to the variable 'likelihood'

Low likelihood: If the player predicts a particular result, but they know from past experience that it is highly unlikely, they typically won't be overly dissapointed.
High likelihood: Yet the likelihood is high and the outcome doesn't occur, dissapointment will also generally be more pronounced.

By adjusting variables such as likilihood, degree of effort or value of results, the designer crafts a set of 'eliciting conditions'. I love this phrase since it gives us game friendly terminology for discussing emotion without reverting to the fuzzy non-functional handwaving of the humanities. By setting your system variables appropriately, you can create eliciting conditions that spark specific categories of emotion.

There is far more work to be done applying these ideas to game development, but as it stands the conceptual framework is already really quite powerful. I've referenced here several useful OCC Charts that Aki assembled that list conditions, variables, main emotional categories and emotional variants. (I do recommend you read the full thesis. It gives a bit more context and it also one of the more clearly written works and easily consumable works to come out in recent years.)

Emotions resulting from personal well being. pg. 211

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Emotions resulting from events involving the fortune of others. pg. 211

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Emotions resulting from future prospects. pg. 212

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Note: Surrealism in video games

Often the best video games have disjointed, narratively surreal worlds. Mario, Pacman, Katamari, Bejeweled and even a game like Portal take place in distinctly surreal locations that obey the logic of association, but are freed from the logic of the real world. Even more interesting is that despite immense amounts of effort making our labeling systems externally consistent (They aren't 'save points', they are regen tanks), the vast majority of players happily engage in surrealist worlds with nary a complaint. If anything, the unnecessary justification introduces more unnecessary dissonance into the game by asking the player to pay attention to details that don't functionally matter.

I see this surrealist aesthetic as the practical outcome of deriving the world from the emotional beats of the gameplay. The constantly tuning and tweaking of various labels needed to bring out the best parts of your game fragments the traditional narrative process. Why is there a walking turtle? Because it fits the mechanics like a glove. That is all the justification that is required and layering on more burdens both the experience and the development process. In the end, light surrealist labels are a positive thing since they gives you substantial wiggle room to avoid dissonance. And due to the solid fit with existing emotional dynamics, they often yields stronger game-centric experiences.

Shadow Emotions and Primary Emotions

2011-07-16T17:54:00.000-07:00

Not all emotions are created equal.

Consider: It is a distinctly different thing to feel sad while reading about a dying mother than to actually feel sad because your mother is dying. The former is a shadowy reflection that we intuitively understand is not immediately threatening. The later is raw, primary and life changing.

I've yet to see existing terminology for this phenomena, so at the risk of stepping on existing toes, let's use the following labels.

Shadow emotions: The emotions we feel when partaking in narratives, art and other safely evocative stimuli
Primary emotions: The emotions we feel when we are in a situation with real perceived consequences.

The closest I've seen to this being described elsewhere is something called the Somatic Marker Theory. It postulates:

"When we make decisions, we must assess the incentive value of the choices available to us, using cognitive and emotional processes. When we face complex and conflicting choices, we may be unable to decide using only cognitive processes, which may become overloaded and unable to help us decide. In these cases (and others), somatic markers can help us decide. Somatic markers are associations between reinforcing stimuli that induce an associated physiological affective state."

Crucially, the theory identify two distinct classes of emotion. The first is the 'body loop' which corresponds closely to primary emotions. The second is the 'as-if body loop' which corresponds to shadow emotions.

No doubt this is a well studied topic, so if someone educated in the neurosciences is able to provide even more accurate labels or links to additional models I'll happily amend this essay.

The distinction between these two classes of emotion may seem academic, but I find myself fascinated by a game's ability to provoke primary emotions in a manner that is difficult if not impossible for more reflective forms of media. As a game designer, I can and have put the player in situation where they experience real loss. The best a movie or book can manage is evoking a shadow of loss.

Brief thoughts on memory and emotion

A small bit of background is necessary to describe the mechanism of shadow emotions. It starts with the link between memory and emotion.

Memories come loaded with judgments. In some sense, the true function of memory has been polluted by a modern concept of coldly analytic 'data storage'. Perhaps a better term for 'memory' is 'lesson'. Each memory has deeply integrated emotional tags that informs us of how we might want to react if we call upon that memory in relation to our current stimuli. When you see a dog sitting on the sidewalk, you instinctively compare it to your existing mental models and memories of past dogs. In that basic act of cognition, you nearly instantly become awash with emotions. Perhaps you feel a sense of comfort and fondness. Or perhaps a wave of anxiety passes through you as you recall the sharp teeth of past encounters gone awry. In a split second, you know exactly how you feel about that dog.

One way of thinking of emotion as an early specialized form of cognition that serves a clear survival function. Quite often you need to make a decision, but you don't have time to think about. Quick! Act now! At this moment, you are flooded with an emotional signal. It is strong, primitive and highly effective at making you either run, attack, bond, threaten or pause. Emotions tied to memories help us boil vast decades of experience down into an immediate instinctive reaction.

Hair trigger emotions exists because more complex cognition takes time and for certain classes of decision, delays yield failure and failure is costly. If you are attacked by wolf, it likely isn't prudent to debate the finer details of how you classify canids. Much later, be it seconds or hours, your conscious understanding of the situation kicks in and moderates the emotional response. More often than not, what we think of as consciousness is little more than a post processed justification of our ongoing roller coaster of instinctive emotional reactions.

Emotions are necessary but they are not civilized. It is easy to imprint rapid fire lessons that trigger at the worst possible moment. A child who learns to lash out in anger as a way of surviving neighborhood bullies might have difficulty as an adult if he reacts the same way when he perceives a more subtle theme of bullying from his boss. What makes managing emotions so tricky is that such emotional triggering situations unfold before we are even aware they are occurring. Emotions are by definition lessons turned into lightning, unconscious action (or inaction as the case may be).

Narrative as a means of playing emotional scenarios

You cannot easily or consciously stop emotions in full activation; however you can train them ahead of time. One method (of many!) is to test and explore our emotions in the safe mediums of narrative, sound and imagery. The mechanism for triggering a safe emotional response seems to be primarily based off a mixture of empathy and the emotional aspects of memory that we've previously covered.

Stimuli: When we see or read a particular evocative narrative or scene.
Memory: We tap into our own related stored memories
Synthesis: We assemble disparate elements into a coherent whole
Empathy: We simulate what we might feel in this particular situation
Conscious understanding: We process the resulting safe emotions from a safe distance.

Now imagine that you read about the dog sitting on the sidewalk. You can confront your anxiety with crystal clear understanding that he cannot hurt you. You activate your empathy and simulate how you might feel if the dog were in fact in front of you. Now you roll the emotion around and savor it, examining it from multiple angles. You instinctively role-play the scenario. Perhaps you become comfortable with the idea that you don't need to immediately run away from all dogs. By storing this revised impression, you slightly moderate your future emotional reactions.

In a biological sense, this is a surprisingly inexpensive method of practicing how to moderate our emotions. Instead of placing yourself in potentially mortal danger, you can instead read about what it while sitting in a chair. The training that occurs is not perfect, but I suspect that it helps. There is a wide body of experimental research that shows how emotions are differentiated through a process of psychological response and then the application of a cognitive label. If you can practice labeling a rush of adrenaline as bravery instead of fear, you may be able to successfully alter your emotions in real world situations.

Though by no means proof of this theory, it is suggestive that many popular fictional and artistic works are highly focused on evoking emotion and chains of strong drama. Situations that are risky, expensive or socially compromising regularly find their way into the evocative arts and enable us to practice those scenarios in a safe fashion.

Shadow Emotions

The relatively safe emotions that result from consuming and simulating evocative stimuli are what I'm calling shadow emotions.

A shadow emotion is by no means a 'fake' emotion. Your heart rate increases, your palms sweat. The patterns of the past carry echos of real emotions and your body responds accordingly. All the physiological signs of experiencing an emotion are present. However, you know intellectually it is a carefully controlled experiment. Despite hysterical claims to the contrary, humans appear to have a surprisingly robust understanding of simulation vs. reality. We labels our simulations as such and can usually set them aside at our convenience.

Shadow emotions are by no means completely safe. Anyone that goes through a therapeutic process where they directly recall past trauma can bear witness to the fact that recalling strong emotions is an intense and even frightening experience. Distance matters when role-playing stored emotions and the more closely you simulate the original event, the stronger the response.

All this leads to many of the common techniques found in making powerful drama or art. This list is by no comprehensive, but it is a good sample of the practical tools available to a craftsman interested evoking shadow emotions:

Richly describe salient stimuli
Exaggerate stimuli (Peak Shift Principle)
Layer multiple channels of stimuli
Target commonly shared emotional triggers (Love, Death, Triumph, etc)
Create coherent chains of context and causation to facilitate easy simulation
Personalize the stimuli to better match the emotional history of an individual.

As an artist, a story teller and a game designer, I've used all of these and they are far less mysterious than many would presume. When such techniques are well executed, you'll increase the intensity of the evoked shadow emotion. The word 'evoke' is key since our concern is more about using a signal to trigger emotions that already exists. As such I think of these techniques clumped primarily into methods of simplifying processing our evocative signal or methods of increasing strength of that signal.

Shadow emotions absolutely exist in games. In fact, the game industry spends ludicrous sums of money attempting to ensure that high end console titles are as good at evoking shadow emotions as media such as movies or books. During the dark reign of the techno-cultists who preached the ascendancy of visual immersion, realism and games as predominantly narrative medium, a thousand chained craftsmen made heroic attempts to evoke stronger shadow emotions. See such baroque creations as Mortal Combat, God of War or L.A. Noire. This expensive pursuit will continue because humans crave shadow emotions as a path to more effective emotional cognition. Game developers, as paid schmucks making disposable and consumable media, have an economic incentive to fill this need.

The next time you safely experience the emotion of shooting a minority-skinned terrorist in the head and watching the beautifully rendered blood and brains splatter in slow motion, step back and consider the emotional role-playing that you are simulating. It obviously isn't real, but you do feel something. Perhaps it is even therapeutic. These are shadow emotions in action. I remain unimpressed, but perhaps if we render those skull fragments at a higher resolution, AAA games will one day achieve something deeply meaningful.

Primary emotions in games

In this expensive pursuit of shadow emotions, we may have accidentally sidelined deeper exploration of a phenomena more fundamental to the emotional capabilities of games.

I spend large portions of my day observing game players. Some of this is observation of others, but there is also a peculiar detached observation of my own reactions to a particular game or prototype. Repeatedly, I see sparkles of emotion that seem to have different roots than shadow emotions. A player might become frustrated that they don't understand a particular level layout. Or they may feel anguish when their character suffers permadeath in Realm of the Mad God. Or they may feel elation at finally getting the long tetrimino necessary to clear four rows in Tetris.

I would make the bold and perhaps unsupportable claim that these responses are not a reference to a past emotional experience. Instead they seem to be derived from much more primitive circuitry. Where do emotions originally come from? Not all are reflections of memories past. There are means of creating emotions from scratch.

Consider the sense of anguish that one feels when the character you've built up over many hours of dedicated play dies for all eternity. This system, permadeath, is quite uncommon in many modern games, but thousands of players go through the process everyday in the game Realm of the Mad God. As a designer you can think of this experience in almost purely mechanical terms. A player invests time and energy into accumulating a resources and capabilities inside a defined value structure. Then due mostly to a failure of skill, the player gets hit with a barrage of bullets and that investment is irretrievably lost.

Despite the coldly mechanistic nature of the system, the player feels intense anguish. It is a raw, primordial thing that courses through your veins and makes breathing difficult. There is really nothing playful or distant about this emotion. The magnitude and newness of the loss directly correlates to the intensity of the experience. Most players I know have great difficulty setting aside the first major loss and pretending that it did not matter. Some will even quit the game because the emotional intensity is just too much to bear.

What I find intriguing about this particular emotion reaction is that it pops up in other non-gaming scenarios. Recently I forgot to save a file and in one horrible instant lost hours of labor. The self recrimination and sense of loss is quite similar. In a more extreme example, when the stock market collapsed in the 1920's the emotional response to abrupt and permanent loss was so great that people took to jumping from buildings. The systemic creation of emotion is a powerful phenomena.

There are variations on the theme that result in a spectrum of different yet equally reproducible emotions. If the player is struck with lag or a control glitch or they feel that some other player helped cause their demise, the emotional reaction is almost always incandescent rage. Small adjustments to the mechanical systems of cause and effect result in distinct emotional responses.

Primary emotions appear to be emotions triggered by interactive situations not evocative stimuli. They tend to involve several telling mechanical factors:

Territory
Time
Resources
Information
Investment and Loss
Skill and Randomness
Social interaction

As I write this list, I can't help but realize that these sound like many of the fundamental elements of games. Yes, we can still talk about games-as-systems when we start talking about emotions. There is no need to scurry back to the well worn tropes of evocative media. As game developers, we really do not need the crutch of shadow emotions to create a meaningful emotional experience for our players. Instead, we can succeed by making "games as games" not "games as some bizarrely crippled copy of another industry."

I wish I could say more about the exact biological process behind generating primary emotions, but alas it is not my area of expertise. Instead, the best I can do for the moment is to describe the pragmatic process that I use to create desired primary emotions in a population of players. Compare the following process to the one I listed above for shadow emotions. They are rather different.

Define: Create mechanics and models that describe a player-centric system of value. What should the player care about and how do the systems and resources reinforce their interest?
Acclimate the player to value structures by having them interact with it repeatedly via various loops and processes. Pay careful attention to skill and resource acquisition as well as the formation of social bonds since these must be grown.
Trigger: Put the player directly in situations involve a practical loss or gain that triggers the generation of new primary emotions.
Label: Apply labels or context to the raw emotion so that players interpret it in the desired fashion. See the two-factor theory of emotion for examples of how contextual labels can transform a base physiological response into a myriad of subtle emotions.

You can certainly use evocative stimuli within such a process, but it will always be a supporting tool. The emotions are engineered from the players interactions and experience with the system and not by bombarding someone with images, dialog or sound. Player choice matters. Failure matters. Learning and skill matters. The game matters.

My friend Stephane Bura has done important work in mapping game systems onto emotions, but there is far more to be done. I highly recommend you read through his pioneering essay Emotion Engineering in Games. It took several years before it started to sink in, but I'm hoping that you'll have a head start.

Conclusion

I've derived immense practical value from the distinction between primary emotions and shadow emotions. Once you've internalized the concept, you can look at a game and ask with great clarity "How is this player emotion being generated?" Once you know the mechanism, you can then take steps to amplify or soften the observed effect. Should you increase the fidelity of visual feedback or merely change a resource variable? If you know neither the type of emotion nor mechanism driving the emotion, you are designing blindly.

It is also important that we start talking about how games generate primary emotions. The feeling of victory in a game of Chess is real. The feeling of anger at a Counter Strike camper is real and visceral. The feeling of belonging when you are asked to join a popular guild will stay with you for the rest of your life. We are not reflecting or empathizing (though this can occur in parallel). Due to the interactive nature of the game and our ability to adopt the value structure of the game, there are consequences that are real enough for our body to muster actual new-to-the-world emotions. This is an amazing and fundamental property of games that is at best weakly represented in more traditional media. Let's play to our strengths.

Every second you spend blathering on about the damnable Hero's Journey or the role of traditional evocative narrative is a second you could instead be exploring the vast and uncharted frontier of emotional game design. We make games. And games are great and powerful entities in their own right. What happens if you strip out as much of your reliance on shadow emotions as possible and focus your design efforts on creating primary emotions in your players?

In Realm of the Mad God, the player dies. And he can't come back. It is a harsh penalty with strong sense of failure. Colliding with a 8x8 pixelated bullet with no fidelity, realism or crafted narrative means something emotionally that no movie or novel will ever capture.

take care,
Danc.

(Edited July 11, 2011 to include a reference to Somatic Marker Theory)
(Edited September 12, 2011 to include a reference to Two-factor Theory of Emotion)

References

Somatic Marker Theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_markers_hypothesis
The Jungle of the Real by Charles Pratt: What do you feel when you play the game of boxing?: http://gamedesignadvance.com/?p=1796
Emotion Engineering in Games by Stephane Bura: http://www.stephanebura.com/emotion/
Constructing Artificial Emotions by Daniel Cook: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1992/constructing_artificial_emotions_.php?print=1

Realm of the Mad God Released!

2011-06-20T11:25:00.000-07:00

A little over a year ago, Alex Carobus and Rob Shillingsburg from WildShadow created a prototype of a re-imagined MMO for the TIGSource Assemblee game jam. David and I started working with them a few months later through Spry Fox, helping flesh out with the monetization, interface and cooperative mechanics. The game has been in public beta for a year, rigorously tested by thousands of passionate players. The metrics look good. The tech is in place. Today, after a huge amount of work by a truly talented team, we are officially launching on the Chrome Web Store.

As with any online game, this is just the start. On the feature side, expect to see the game grow and evolve substantially in the coming months. On the distribution side, we'll also be slowly be rolling the game out to thousands of portal sites. Limber up your shooting finger and give Realm a go. Don't forget to dodge.

Indies Innovate

Realm of the Mad God is unique. If you were to toss various gaming labels at it, you'd get the following:

Fantasy MMORPG
Bullet Hell Shooter (so many bullets!)
Co-op only
Real-time combat (with 80+ players on screen)
Permadeath

As added spice, it runs in a browser using Flash, has a scalable cloud-based backend, sports user generated art and is rather effectively funded by a free-to-play business model.

It turns out that only an indie has the ability to reinvent the MMO genre from the ground up. Certainly no large studio could have made Realm. The original idea contained risky design, challenging hardcore gameplay, hitherto unseen technology. Heck, who even thinks of greenlighting a modern game with permadeath? Yet because of exactly these moonshot design constraints, Realm is fresher than 90% of the games that ever get released. Core gamers who love great games will love Realm.

Realm falls into the emerging category I think of as "Top Shelf Indie": highly playable games that offer deep, polished experiences that are just as much fun as more bloated titles but come with the distinctive spin that only a smaller independent team can manage. Pulling such a feat off requires three ingredients that are rare in our industry:

A highly talented small team
Freedom to pursue an innovative unified design vision
The ability to rapidly release and iterate on playable builds.

Simple stuff. If you love making games, you should look at your current project and ask yourself how many of these ingredients you have in place. (Yes, you deserve to work on a team with all of these.)

Lessons

Here are a couple of the big design challenges:

Co-op is a pervasive design philosophy, not a tacked on feature.
Rival goods are a form of PvP

Co-op is a pervasive design philosophy, not a tacked on feature.

The rule of thumb for everything is "Does this mechanic make the game better to play together?" Here are a few of the systems in place the encourage cooperative play.

Experience is shared. All you need to do in order to earn experience is to be close by when an enemy is killed. There is a simple yet effective benefit from playing with others. More players means enemies die more quickly, so players working together level and earn our time-based currency (fame) more quickly.
Teleporting is cheap. Players can quickly and easily teleport to other players. In early builds, most players would wander for hours without seeing another human being. A smaller percentage of players liked this, but most simply assumed the game was single player and then left. We also wanted to avoid requiring a complex guild and grouping system, especially for new players. As it stands now, it is difficult to play for long without another player jumping to your position and playing alongside you.
All experience levels plays together: Level 1 players can easily play alongside Level 20 players. They increase their chance of dying, but there are few artificial barriers if you want to group together with friends of a different level. It also helps that the leveling curves are more shallow than is typical. he most powerful player is only about 30 times more powerful than a first level player.
Twinking is encouraged since loot is plentiful, inventory is limited and there isn't a direct means of cashing in items for a more liquid currency. As such there is a culture of players sharing stuff they've found with other players.

Crowds form organically and you'd find many small bands merrily adventuring through the world.

Yet even with all these core systems in place co-op can still be quite fragile. One incredibly cool (and powerful) character is the rogue who has the ability to go invisible and rush in for a sneak attack. Yet, since this class can still be hit by stray bullets, the rogue prefers to work alone where he have better control over exactly how enemy attacks are triggered. As a result there is now a large population of solo-focused players that often complain bitterly when anyone from the larger community attempts to play cooperatively. Other players resent the aptly named rogue for playing selfishly and stealing loot they would have otherwise had a chance to pick up. In essence, an individually fun class actively pollutes the core intent of the game.

So lesson I've learned is that co-op works best when every system in the game is tuned to encourage inexpensive and easy cooperation. This can mean tossing many traditional concepts like expensive travel or requiring guilds for groups. It may mean nerfing or changing a fun and delightful mechanic if it somehow damages the community as a whole. In multiplayer games, finding the fun isn't enough. You need to maximize the fun without poisoning the experience of others.

Rival goods are a form of PvP

An early decision made for the first prototype haunted the game for far too long. Loot in Realm is a rival good; to paraphrase Raph Koster, "If I grab it, you can't." While the rest of the game is all about mutual benefit, loot as a rival good brought out the bloodlust in our players on a number of levels.

Initial looting: A team of players will cooperate beautiful to bring down a large boss. They'll coordinate, send happy messages and joke with one another. Yet as soon as someone snags loot that another person desired, the conversation turns acrimonious. Inevitably one player grabs far more loot than others and the predominate emotions of the game decay into greed, distrust and a deeply felt lack of fairness.
Death: When someone dies, a percentage of their items stay on the body. This yields a huge incentive to steal from your fellow players. I'd love to run some experiments where all items on a body go away or are soulbound and see how that changes the mood of the community.

What is tricky about both of these is that both looting and stealing from corpses is surprisingly fun. Players treat it as a form of survival of the fittest PvP and a mercenary minority have perfected their skills as efficient looters. Yet as a whole, these 'fun' moments for individuals create a dysfunctional society.

We are methodically solving for these issues by awarding players with soulbound loot. This removes much of the competitive nature of picking up loot and turns loot into a non-rival good. Showing up and helping out gets you loot, not stealing from others.

Other lessons

The game does some other things worth noting that are common to other games I've mentioned here. These help ensure that a small team can release a game that traditionally requires the efforts of hundreds:

Design from the root: Instead of accepting genre conventions, each new feature was vigorously questioned to see if it fit the core concept of the game as a co-op MMO shooter.
Procedural generation: All the maps and dungeons are procedurally generated. This means content is quite cheap.
User generated content: The initial graphics used in the game came from the wonderful Oryx set. However, Alex invested a good amount of time in building a full featured sprite editor that allows users to make new monsters, items and animations. Now almost all new visuals end up being sourced from the community.

Conclusion

MMOs are intensely complex games where even simple systems blossom into a thousand layers of culture and community. The rules of the game create explosive economies, ecosystems and power structures that deeply intertwine with the lives of players. I'm really not surprised that so many MMOs are essentially clones. The genre canon is a tightly wound mechanism where even small changes can destroy your game. Every MMO team faces this particular minefield and must ask themselves if they have the guts to mess with standards that have been gingerly polished over decades.

Most back away from the challenge with fear in their eyes. Instead of making something new, they take the coward's path and desperately try to differentiate their me-too creation with pointless cut-scenes, laborious writing and gaudy graphics.

Alex and Rob took the challenge. Yes, rebuilding many of these systems from a unique starting place is an epic undertaking. But it worked. We need more teams with the guts and the ability to reinvent genre conventions. We need more games like Realm of the Mad God.

take care,
Danc.

A blunt critique of game criticism

2011-05-07T18:09:00.000-07:00

Note: This essay has gone through a couple drafts based off extensive feedback (which you can read below in the comments). I'm aiming for a version of this essay that is less likely to violently misinterpreted by a majority of readers. Apologies for altering the context of any of the comments below...an unfortunate peril of live editing. Again, let me know where I'm wrong. Let me know which portions makes sense.

I read Ben Abraham's weekly summary of game criticism over at Critical Distance. Unlike a decade ago, there is now an absolute deluge of essays being written about games. I see reactions, counter reactions, and copious commentary. What is difficult to find is good writing that dreams of improving the art and craft of games.

There are three areas of improving writing on games:

We need better methods of filtering game criticism. The types of writing about games have exploded. With communities of writers attempting to support highly divergent goals and audiences, simply understanding if an essay is useful is a huge challenge.
We need writers who are more deeply educated in the art, craft and science of games. The majority of "game criticism" tends to be informed by a narrow population of gamers, journalists and academics specializing in the humanities. We are often missing experienced perspective from the sciences and the developers of games. The vast body of game criticism is written by people that I would consider partial game illiterates. They are dance judges who have watched Dancing with the Stars, but who have never danced.
We need a defined class of game writing that focuses on improving games. The existing community will continue writing about the experience of gaming. But what if there were a small group that wished to do more than talk about playing? Imagine holding your writing to the standard that asks you to ratchet forward the creative conversation. For this tiny crew, judge your writing on its ability to directly improve the art, culture and science of games in an incontrovertible fashion.

The blossoming of shallow game criticism

When I started writing about games, there was hardly anyone talking about games in a thoughtful manner. At best, you had the chatter of more vocal gamers. Even journalists were little more than gamers with a bigger podium. The developers snuck in peer conversations once or twice a year in hotel bars and then went off to toil in intellectual isolation. An admittedly sad state of affairs.

Today,we've got the developer blogs on Gamasutra, dozens of conferences, the efforts of the Escapist, the rise of the intellectual game journalist and the slow blossoming of academic writing. The language has improved dramatically. With the arrival of communities of like-minded bloggers and the co-opting of various university departments, writers find themselves encouraged to say what little they can say in increasingly wordy missives. Each week I find myself inundated with essays that appear on the surface to be fascinating treasure troves of insight.

When I invest my time digging past the fresh coat of erudite language, much of the content is a regurgitation of the same tired discussion from ages past. Consider Adam Ruch's recent article "First Or Third Person – What’s Your Perspective?" (I chose this example not to be cruel, but because it was at the top of Ben's recent list of game criticism.) Adam is introduced as "a PhD candidate, currently writing about Video Games Criticism" and "a pretty smart guy!"

Yet the essay is little more than a series of personal descriptions of how he feels when he plays certain games. There is little insight that couldn't be gained by sitting down with a beer and a controller. There is no attempt at gathering empirical evidence. Adam could have saved everyone a vast amount of time with the TL;DR summary: "In 3rd person you can see (and thus empathize) with a visualized character and in 1st person, you can't." Once you strip away the laborious language, you have yet another bit of fluffy gamer opinion written by a young student.

There's a clear and obvious need for writing by young gamers attempting to think about their hobby. Without such essays, you never gains the skills needed to write something better. But there needs to be a better filter.

Classifying game criticism

To create a filter, it helps to ask "what is game criticism?" This simple question results in a large range of definitions, each of which is vigorously defended by bespectacled tribal groups.

Traditional reviews: The stated goal is to inform players if they should purchase or try a specific game. Enough information is given to enable players to compare various games without actually wasting time or money playing them. Reviews cover games ranging from the latest Mario blockbuster to a smaller indie title deserving of attention.
Playthroughs: Where reviews are often (but not always) dry affairs that attempt objectivity, a play through seeks to describe the emotional experience of a game through a single player's eyes. Though I suspect many would disagree, I see the subjective descriptions of gaming found in New Game Journalism as a type of playthrough.
Gamer culture: The impact of games on the culture and identity of the players.
Connecting games with the humanities: An academic exercise in which various aspects of games are described as being part of an ongoing structure of philosophy, movie criticism, literary criticism, art history, rhetoric, etc.
Connecting games with the sciences: An academic exercise in which games are analyzed using the tools of psychology, sociology, economics, etc.
Industry analysis: A discussion of large scale trends in the industry such as platforms, new business models and the ever popular unexpected debacle.
Game analysis: "Here's a working game. Here's the experiment. Here are the repeatable lessons I learned."
Meta-discussions of game criticism: Discussion of the goals, best practices and changes in the broader field of game criticism. This article is one example of such an article.

Types of writers: To complicate matters further there are several distinct populations of writers who come with their own goals and target audiences.

Journalists: Writers paid to create content for a publication. The larger goal of the publication is often to acquire readers that pay the bills which in turn has a strong impact on the style and content of the writing. Typically journalists targets their writing at mainstream gamers or a sizable niche (such as PC gaming). The goal is to inform, entertain and build a sense of community. There is rarely any explicit call to make games better. Rock Paper Shotgun is a good example of journalists engaging in reviews, playthroughs and the occasional piece of industry analysis.
Gamer Hobbyists / Students: People who come from a background of playing games and what to share their thoughts. There is rarely a larger goal and just the fact that someone is reading what they write is often encouragement enough to continue. The audience is often far narrower since there is no economic reason to broaden the reach.
Academics / Intellectuals: People who are attempting to build a larger tradition of analysis. They exist in a self-contained, self referencing world of past papers, publishing, and tenure. Their audience is other academics and the language is often hyper specialized. External communication is rare and the bigger goal is the preservation and extension of existing systems of value. There are rare academics that do original experimental research (thank you!).
Developers: People who make games. Their audience is other game developers. The higher goal is to improve the art and science of games so that games are alway become better: more expressive, more appealing, more efficient, more effective, more successful.

None of this is clearly defined. The types of writers mix together in unexpected ways. They change roles over time. They intentionally obscure their perspective. For example, the writing of journalists for certain sites like IGN may mimic the writing by hobbyists. Or a student might assume the role of an intellectual to give their writing stronger trappings of authority. Some of the writers for Rock Paper Shotgun have started making games.

Amusingly, all groups feel like they are in the minority. Hobbyists feel that they must constantly burst forth in YMCA-style song about gamer pride or the Man will crush their love of games. Journalists feel no one appreciates their heroic efforts at balancing gamer passion, cultural translations and commercialization. Academics huddle in their isolated departments and wonder why no one listens when they speak the Truth (as defined by a philosopher from the 1970's). Game developers are too busy crunching or being fired to write much and generally respond in grunts as a result. 'Touchy' is as good a description as any single segment for the entire crew. Which makes even agreeing on goals, categories and terms difficult.

Here's an attempt: If I were to categorize Andy's article: He is a student acting as an academic, writing what is essentially a playthrough that in turn masquerades as game analysis. The fact that he is a student writing a playthrough is fine. The multiple levels of deception are what initially raised my hackles.

Given this, if you fail to disclose your perspective, you are very likely wasting the precious time of your reader. If you deliberately obscure this information (as I've seen many student or indies tempted to do) you are being a dishonest member of our community. Hey! Stop doing that...there is no shame in writing openly and honestly that you are a gamer expressing your love and appreciation for games. Just don't obscure your intent with faux intellectualism.

Taking inventory

Given this classification system, what do we have in abundance and what are we lacking? Here is what I see: (and this admittedly may be biased by my own personal consumption habits):

Dominant Majority: Journalists and hobbyist gamers writing reviews and playthroughs make up the bulk of the writing on games. There are very naturally more gamers than any other group so it is quite reasonably that gamers and those that serve gamers produce the highest volume of game writing.
Growing Minority: Academics and intellectuals connecting the dots between games and the humanities are another major category and rally under the 'game criticism' label.
Dwindling Minority: Game analysis, and essays that connect games with the sciences are far less common. There are a handful of trade sites like Gamasutra that keep the light alive, but in general it is a desert out there.

The limitations of writing only by gamers

When I look at this distribution, something strikes me as odd: the vast majority of the rest of writers listed above do not make games, nor do they understand how games are made. I can understand that there are many writers who are happy just to marinate in the warm communal bath of gamer burbling. I've heard many a gamer tell me that they have no need for any additional knowledge or perspective on games other than what they gain through the playing of games.

Yet I also imagine a mythical writer that wants to uncover additional insights into what makes games tick. For these curious souls, having hands-on experience making games gives them the ability to observe nuances that no other gamer-only critic could manage. For those of you instantly think of C++ when you hear the term 'making games', I am very specifically not talking about programming or technical skills. By making games, be it board games, inventing new sports or making even the simplest of indie games, you gain insight into the fundamental structure of games and how they produce the end user experience that we all find so valuable. You start to understand interaction loops, pacing, skill acquisition, randomness, how narrative supports mechanics, play styles and dozens of others of foundational game concepts that are difficult to derives from the experiences of being just a gamer. These are not passing trends in engineering or technology. These are the bones of what makes a game a game.

Consider the act of judging dances. Dancing (like making games) is a highly technical craft that may be enjoyed superficially or judged in a rigorous fashion. On one hand you have a trained dancer. On the other hand, you have someone who has watched Dancing with the Stars, but never fully engaged in the practical mastery necessary to understand the foundations of the art. I submit that if both have comparable skills of analysis and communication, the one with personal experience as a dancer would make the more informed critic.

(It needs to be said: The existence of educated judges does not obsolete the right of the audience to judge. Dancing with the Stars would not exist if it wasn't for the people in the audience yelling out their own scores, filling message boards with thousands of comments, organizing around favorites and doing all the things that passionate members of a community do. Games are the same. An educated minority only add richness to the conversation. It does not lessen the existing conversation.)

In general, game criticism tends not to be informed hands-on knowledge about what it takes to make a competent game. In the past week of essays on Critical Distance, I found 1 writer of 12 had any declared experience making games.

This is all of course highly intentional on the part of the promoters of game criticism by gamers. When they look for role models in other media, they see no need for understanding the lowly techniques of creation. Naive consumption without a deep understanding of form is seen by some as a means of recording a gamer's reactions without undue outside influence. Purely evocative media as music, video, writing or painting can often be reasonable well described using tools from the humanities and the personal reaction of an individual. If I want to understand a novel, a single sample has limitations, but it can convey the essence of the experience surprisingly well.

Yet though games do possess evocative elements, they also are driven by a functional heart that resists being reduced to only the softest of sciences. Bridges, though undeniably aesthetic and cultural objects, can also be understood as functional or economic creations. Playthroughs, aesthetics, rhetoric, literary theory, film theory, art history may be one set of valuable perspectives, but if you only rely on these, you will fail to paint a complete picture the babbling, whirring human-mechanical reality of a games.

There is so much about games that is missing from the majority of today's writing. Games have much in common with functional works involving mathematics, psychology, governments, economics or other complex systems. Given population A with skills B, we experimentally validate that we get result C. We have a rich tradition of design practice stretch across Miyamoto to Sid Meier to modern metrics-driven social games. There exists game design theory stemming from folks like Chris Crawford, Eric Zimmerman and Raph Koster. The instinct of practicing designers alone is an immense iceberg of unwritten knowledge just waiting to be described and shared.

These are vast fields that are mostly untapped by today's writer. And for good reason. You can only dig into them at the root if you devote a large hunk of your life to mastering them through direct experience. This means making games in a thoughtful manner and then sharing those insights with those who will only play. Such people are rare. We need to train more of them.

Wanted: Game analysis
I suspect that it is too late for the field of game criticism to ever again broadly mean 'critical thoughts about games'. Somewhere along the line we imported wholesale too much baggage from media that long ago stagnated under the weight of navel-gazing divorced from practice.

Instead, we need a new field of discussion. Let's expand up on the topic above I called Game Analysis.

Goal: Advance the art and science of games. Simply looking at what exists is not enough. Instead, we leverage what exists in order to to ask what is next and create the conceptual language and tools that get us there.
Audience: Anyone interested in deeply considering how to improve games.

Who can write on this topic? Pretty much anyone. Your work will have more impact if you educate yourself in the following ways:

Make games. Again and again and again. Understand why games work by making games that work.
Study the fields of science that deal with complex functional systems.
Devour any and all existing writing both on games and on other unrelated fields to see if they might move the dial forward.
Share and discuss useful thoughts from your newly enlightened perspective.

Simply making games does not make you a good at game analysis. I have a friend who makes games, but publicly writes gamer-esque ramblings. Then he wonders why no one pays attention. A developer ranting about their personal, emotional experience with the controls in Super Meat Boy from the perspective of 'Dude, I'm a gamer just like you" no more improves the state of games than a 13-year old gamer engaged in creating entertainment for his blog. Think deeply about what you do and contribute meaningful writing. I love the visual of a ratchet. Every click advances and builds a foundation of steel that will not let the whole fall backwards.

For those with real world understanding of how to make games better, ask yourself the following questions about what you write:

Grounded: Are you basing your theories off empirical evidence? Do not write something merely because you had a feeling to express.
Aware: Do you know what other people have written in the past? Do the research and be an informed commenter.
Insightful: Does your writing add a substantial new perspective or tool that moves the conversation forward? Do not rehash the same old thing simply because you have an opinion on the currently popular meme.
Actionable: Does your writing identify a course of action that previously was obscured? Do not let an exploration of an idea wander off into vague hand-waving. Ask the reader to perform an experiment that increases the knowledge of the community as a whole.

There is a clear benefit when you follow these guidelines.

Your writing stands out from the muck. The world craves a path forward and the intelligent people you attract by being a grounded, aware, insightful and actionable writer open doors that you would never otherwise find.
You improve the world. Your small contributions build upon the work of others to create a mountain of human endeavor that builds our medium to heights we can only barely imagine.

As a small closing note, I do realize that many writers are happy writing as only gamers or only journalists or only a specific sub-branch of academia and see no need to branch out.

But we can do more. I come at this topic with the personal belief that merely rehashing the works of others is not nearly enough. As a creator, you have only a few short years to build something great that changes the world. Hold yourself to a higher standard. Be more than a gamer who is writing about personal experiences. Be more than an academic trying to force games into a 200-year old history of criticism. Take this weekend, grab some dice and build a game. Play test it (you aren't building games unless you do). Polish it. Release it. Ask yourself what this tells you about the nature of games and incorporate that critical perspective into your writing. As years pass and you release your 10th or 20th game, reflect on what have you learned. Share your journey with the world and raise the level of conversation.

take care
Danc.

Example game analysis

Some game essays that fit the criteria above. Heaven forbid I write an essay like this one without giving some positive examples. ;-)

Redesigning Wild Ones into Playdom's Top Game: A Social Game Design Reboot: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6362/redesigning_wild_ones_into_.php?print=1#
The Lives of Three Dying Games: http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2011/04/08/the-lives-of-three-dying-playfish-games/
Donkey Space: http://gamedesignadvance.com/?p=2346#
The Psychological Weight of History: http://www.psychologyofgames.com/2011/03/02/the-psychological-weight-of-history/
Extra Credits: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits
Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfighthttp://rfrost.people.si.umich.edu/courses/MatCult/content/Geertz.pdf
@Play: http://www.gamesetwatch.com/column_at_play/
Game Criticism: Why we need and why review aren't it: http://playthisthing.com/game-criticism-why-we-need-it-and-why-reviews-arent-it

Responses to common comments

Most game criticism is not for developers so none of this matters: You are correct. This essay is only for those rare writers who wish to improve their craft by mastering new perspectives that are fundamental to the art and science of games.
Game criticism is not about improving games. It is about studying what exists: I understand that there are people who prefer to be historians, catalogers and masticators of culture. There is still room for both catalogers and people who dream about the future. Perhaps not under the banner of 'game criticism' but certainly within games as whole.
But making games is engineering and that is dull and soulless: No, it isn't. Only a small portion of making games is the technical craft of drawing numbers on cardboard (if it is a board game) or getting triangles to show up (if it is a 3D video game). Games are about building systems of rules, affordances and people. They are art, science and community rolled up into one giant holistic act of creativity and play. To make games well, you need to understand the whole picture. I desire more writing from this holistic perspective, not from one narrow and highly uninformed perspective.
How will game developers know what players are feeling if not for game criticism?: Game developers are constantly looking at a vast range of quantitative and qualitative data. The entire process of game development is built around observing players and adjusting the game (thousands of times!) till the system reaches a desired state of operation. Individual opinions are constantly taken into account. I personally love watching players and asking them directly what they feel. In light of this, having a piece of well written criticism is often interesting, but needs to be balanced against the weight of other (often more representative) players. Since the critic almost never understands the systems underlying their experience, most notes on improvements or root causes are typically wildly off base. This isn't the fault of the game critic. They simply lack access to both the dozens (or thousands) of player data points and the intimate knowledge of the game mechanics. Perhaps one out of a hundred provides a minor insight into a specific game.

Game Design Logs

2011-05-02T23:53:00.000-07:00

If you still practice or encourage the outdated practice of writing long design documents, you are doing your team and your business a grave disfavor. Long design docs embody and promote an insidious world view: They make the false claim that the most effective way to make a game is to create a fixed engineering specification and then hand that off to developers to implement feature by bullet-pointed feature.

Great game development is actively harmed by this assumption. Pre-allocating resources at an early stage interrupts the exploratory iteration needed to find the fun in a game. A written plan that stretches months into the future is like a stake through the heart of a good game process. Instead of quickly pivoting to amplify a delightful opportunity found during play testing, you end up blindly barreling towards completion on a some ineffectual paper fantasy.

Yet, there is still a need for documentation. Why?

We need a persistent repository of decisions: Teams include many people and conversation occurs asynchronously. Without centralized documents, you end up with a fragmented conversation where many decisions made in one-on-one conversations are lost to the broader team forever.
We need a shared vision: Documents also helps forge a common vision of the next iteration. In a situation where everyone has strong and varied opinions, it is essential that someone can lead the team to by unambiguously stating what comes next. Apparently even God needed documentation.

Design logs

What I do now is write a little something I call a 'design log.' Game design is a process of informed iteration, not a fixed engineering plan that you implement. The form of your design documentation should flow from this philosophy.

How to write a design log

Start with a concept: At the very bottom of the design log is the initial concept. This is the rough idea started the design in the first place. These are 2 to 10 pages long and contain just enough text, images and inspiration to start development. I usually focus mine on the core interaction loop that we want to first prototype.
Build the prototype: Design logs exist as a supplement to a working version of the game. Make something you can play as soon as humanly possible. Kill graphics, features, plot or anything that gets in the way of making a game you can react to on a tactile and experiential level.
Add a Daily Entry: After substantial fiddling with your prototype, add a daily entry above the concept to your design log. This contains daily play notes, prioritized next steps and ideas. The goal of the daily entry is to move the project forward. You are constantly trying to answer the question "How do we improve the current game?"
Repeat: Every day or two, you add a new daily entry and the old ones eventually roll off the bottom of the screen. Much like a blog, the fresh stuff is at the top and the old stuff is at the bottom.

For the daily entry, I try to keep to the following format, but it is really quite flexible.

Heading: The heading is today's date.
Play Notes: These are the designer's reaction to the day's working build. I list what worked well and issues I ran into. For every issue that's raised, I try to come up with a reasonable solution.
Prioritized Next Steps: If the list of issues is long, I'll call out the order in which they could be tackled. Sometimes I'll work to create this list, if the backlog has gotten large. For those agile folks out there, think of it as a Just-In-Time backlog. If you don't need this section at a point in time, don't add it.
Tasks accomplished: If work has been done, we mark it on the document. Some teams add a new list of work accomplished to the daily entry. Others just cross off notes directly in the doc.
Experiments: Big, crazy experiments that move the game forward in big steps. Without these, you cannot leap to a better local maxima.

Tools for creating a design log

I personally love using Google Docs for my design logs. Here are some of the advantages.

Real time conversation: Multiple people can edit the doc at the same time. I've had some very high bandwidth editing sessions with 3 people all adding and resolving comments like crazy. No more passing documents around or managing versions.
Comments tied to text: People can comment on specific section of the text. They can also reply to the comments. This keeps the conversation focused on specific details instead of hand waving. No more long rambling thread that diverged from the original topic long ago.
Ability to resolve comments: Once a comment thread is finished and the resolution incorporated back into the doc, you can resolve it and hide it away. This keeps the document clean and lets you know when it is time to move on.
Email alerts: When someone adds a comment, other users subscribed to the doc get an email. This acts as a re-engagement system that brings the very busy people on the team back to the document.

Some tools are poor choices for creating design logs:

Microsoft Word: The lack of decent collaboration tools results in locked files, overwritten files and stagnant conversations. Word is the single most used writing tool, yet it remains the worst possible choice for working designers.
Email: Email lets you reply to specific issues nicely, but the thread of the conversation seems to splinter off rather rapidly. Or you get the counter productive 'epic email thread'. For short term issues it works reasonably. For designs that live longer than a week, email designs turn into an incoherent mess.
Blogs: I've been trying to get blogs to work as design spaces for years. The inability to tie comments directly to text is the major failing as is the inability for others to edit the post simultaneously. Many developers create developer blog, but most feel like one-to-many medium instead of a collaborative conversation that moves the game forward. Consider these issues a challenge for those of you who love blogs.

Some tips for using the design log effectively

Don't add too much in a single day: It can be tempting for the designer to add dozens of pages of notes and ideas in a single day. This just overwhelms the team. A good rule of thumb is to keep the daily notes to a level that can be read in 5 minutes. It is uncommon that even a large team will be able to accomplish more than a page or two worth of work in a day, so self edit and focus the writing on things that will make the biggest impact. When it comes to design, there are no awards for quantity only quality. Instead of pouring out a giant missive, take a walk and consider what really matters. Your designs will improve.
For larger teams consider having a handful of logs. We have a design log and an art log for one project and that splits up the discussion nicely. I intentionally work with small teams, so I'd be curious to hear how the concept works with production heavy teams that traditionally have difficulty iterating on and evolving their design.
Make sure you have a conversation, not a monologue: Ultimately, a good design log is an ongoing conversation, not the rambling of an isolated individual. By talking things through together, everyone internalizes the design and makes it their own. Without this conversation, you just have meaningless words on a page.

Benefits

Here are the benefits I've noticed of the design log approach. These are attributes you should look for in any healthy design process.

Real: The design notes are heavily based off the last working build. This reduces the tendency for the designer to wander off into la-la land imagining cool systems that don't tie back to the game you are actively growing.
Actionable: Each day there is a list of improvements that the team can work on next. Very little about the design is theoretical.
Communal: Everyone can jump in and comment and make suggestions. The design notes often act as a lightning rod for directing comments and prompting ideas.
Focused: This is not a spaghetti wiki. There is a clear thread of intentional design from the bottom of the document all the way to the top. You can approach the document as a new team member and read the story of how the game has evolved.
Fresh: The topmost items on the log are always new insights based off new learning from the latest build. Stale items fall to the bottom of the doc. This ensures that the document is meaningful to reads and encourages you to create an always living and evolving document.
Agile: As you learn more about the dynamics of the design, you can very easily steer towards the most promising opportunities. For many teams, especially ones in preproduction, a design log can replace backlogs and task lists.

Most importantly, the game design log fits the nature of design: It is an essential quality of a game design that it evolves over time. At the heart is a functioning product used by real people who have real reactions to what you've built. You try new things. You trim experiments that you imagined would work but didn't. You double down on the delightful surprises that you could have never predicted upfront. A design is not plan of execution. A design is living process that grows a result organically from the journey that team takes together. It is an alchemical chain reaction of players, systems, teams, talents and design. The starting point influences, but cannot fully define the end result.

There is no place for a dusty design tome in such a dynamic world of evolution. On the other hand a design log fits. It helps remove the oppressive emphasis on completing preordained features. Day-by-day, an active design log encourages the team to embrace the iterative spirit of great game development.

take care
Danc.

What the heck happened to Clippy? Ribbon Hero 2 released

2011-04-26T00:37:00.000-07:00

Last year, Ribbon Hero, a game that teaches people how to use Microsoft Office came out. It was one of the few gamification projects that tried to be an actual game instead of being just lame slathering of points and achievements. Now comes the sequel.

David Edery and I have been helping the team over at Office Labs take that initial experiment and fulfill its fascinating potential. I'm super proud of what Jen and crew made. You can download Ribbon Hero 2: Clippy's Second Chance at http://www.ribbonhero.com

In it, you find out what the heck happened to Clippy after he was fired for being...well, an internet meme for failure. 'Tis a lurid tale of shame and angry mobs. Apparently a spoonful of narrative makes it far more likely that folks finish.

Lessons in gamification

I've worked with a large number of teams on the applying game design real world activities. Not all are successes. Why did the Office Labs team succeed in releasing a polished, effective, enjoyable game when so many gamification projects fail to live up to their goals? Here's my take:

Identify the core game loop: Ribbon Hero is a game first and foremost. At the heart of the game is a light challenge where you demonstrate your knowledge of using Office. The team searched for and found a fun activity to build their product around. Very few gamification projects invest in the extensive prototyping necessary to identify their core loop. As a result, they end up throwing away their budget finishing a crap core mechanic. Your team needs to be willing to iterate in order to converge on the fun.
Support the core game loop by killing extraneous features: Most application teams believe they win if they complete more features. A good game wins by providing a great experience and more often than not this means actively removing and streamlining features. Any feature that isn't fundamental to the core game is a stumbling block. New features that cause confusion actively destroy value. Ribbon Hero 2 has fewer features than Ribbon Hero 1, yet is a substantially better game. I've noticed this key concept goes against what most application teams dream about at night. Your team should adopt the mindset that features are your enemy and subtract all those that do not support the core loop.
Master the art of polish: Game mechanics are like musical instruments, not patterns you apply and get some predetermined result. The difference between a well-executed point system that supports a player's intrinsic motivation and a pre-packaged badge API is the difference between a violin concerto and some imbecile screeching away on a busted fiddle. Polish matters. A good team takes the extra months to smooth away rough edges, emphasize rewards, add tiny details and make the entire experience glow. During polish, no new features are added. Instead, you observe and live with the game, making it better in a thousand little ways.
Get long term buy in: A game project often costs 3 to 10 times as much as a basic feature that serves the same functional task. During large parts of the project (prototyping, early production and late production) the project appears to either be completely schizophrenic or stagnant with little visible change. Very few companies other than game companies are culturally capable of dealing with such frustrating progress signals. The Ribbon Hero team trusted the process of game development enough to double down on resources and extend the schedule when they needed. Your team needs to do the same.
Willingness to learn: The team knew nothing about game development when they started. Instead of taking the easy path and trying to turn a game into an application, they admitted that their previous expertise wasn't enough. In an act of humbleness that I find rare, Jen and crew buckled down to the task of learning a radically new discipline. They visited GDC, participated in game design workshops, prototyped crazy ideas, and trained themselves to foster moments of delight. They found out that game design is to application development what dance is to running. And in the end, after years of training (and re-training), they learned to dance.

Very few teams successfully apply game mechanics to real life because making a game is an exhausting iterative activity. It takes immense political will, dedicated resources and deep belief that the right experience, not just the right feature, can change the world. Games are no silver bullet. Instead, real gamification is a master-level exercise in passionately pursuing great usability and user experience. Most such projects fail because few teams have the skill, the patience or the values to pull off making a great game.

Was it worth it? The metrics will be the final judge. However, I joked with the team that if the Ribbon Hero managed to get played by enough people, it is likely more effective at helping Microsoft's brand than any of the last billion dollars they spent on PR. This simple game is probably the most human thing to come out of Microsoft in years. Take that for what you will, but I'm happy to have been part of the journey.

take care,
Danc.

GDC 2011: The Game of Platform Power

2011-03-17T17:20:00.000-07:00

Here are the slides and notes to my GDC presentation, "The Game of Platform Power". In our industry, history repeats itself again and again, but each new generation of developers often fails to learn past lessons. Platforms in particular have a well established life cycle and their relationship with a developer changes as they mature. Yet, I regularly see developers completely caught off guards as their new favorite platform suddenly stops being their friend and starts treating them as a harvestable resource. Don't be surprised. This is the way of things and it has happened dozens of times in the past.

My small hope is that by naming and illuminating some of the common phases and practices of platforms, developers will be able to better deal with the inevitable shifts. I would like nothing better than smart game developers to divorce their businesses from the platform life cycle and build direct relationships with long lasting communities of passionate gamers.

Gdc 2011 game of platform power

View more documents from Daniel Cook.

I will note that I have nothing against platforms despite what my occasionally spicy rhetoric may suggest. I respect and appreciate them like a biologist appreciates a large predator. I've personally walked many miles in the shoes of platform developer. (I spent 10 years building platforms and I loved it.) It is a hard path and platforms do their best. However, ultimately I feel it is better for everyone to be a strong advocate for the users and the game developers that directly serve them. In the long view of history picture, these two are the essential players.

take care,
Danc.

List of Game Artists

2011-03-09T18:17:00.000-08:00

A very large number of game developers come to Lostgarden looking for game art. (Apparently I'm on the first page of results if you search for 'free game art')

Of those folks that show up, some are happy to find my collections of free art. A whole slew of other write me asking if I can make art for them. Unfortunately I haven't done contract art for decades and now pretty much exclusively focus on game design. My artist days happened about three careers ago. :-) But still I hate the idea of not being able to connect talented teams with amazing artists.

This post is an experiment. If you are a talented artist looking to do freelance game art, add the following information in a comment below:

Your name
A link to a gallery of your work
A note on if you are wiling to work for revenue share or you prefer upfront payment only.
Some means of contacting you. For example bob [at] gameart.com

The goal is to build up a living directory of talented game artists. If you've worked with an artist on a game and you know they are open for work, do them a favor and post their portfolio here using the format above. Post a link to this page on any forum or list where game artists hang out.

All the best,
Danc.

PS: I'm actively looking for an illustrator for a project, so if you post a link there's a good chance at least I'll be checking out your portfolio. :-) (The current gig involves dozens of adorable panda illustrations.) And there seem to be an unending stream of new projects that need art rolling into Spry Fox all the time.

The Declaration of Game Designer Independence

2011-02-05T13:32:00.000-08:00

On a cool, clear Austin weekend, a group of experienced game designers gathered for their yearly retreat. At night they swapped stories of an industry in turmoil. As social games and mobile games rewrite the landscape, power struggles between business and design dominate and designers find themselves being sidelined or abused. And the products they work on suffer horribly as a result. It is a time when musty old assumptions are questioned. It is also a rare opportunity to identify universal best practices that can help us navigate new platforms, new genres and new gaming experiences.

So during the day, we asked ourselves some hard questions. When was design successful? How do designers hurt their own credibility and effectiveness? This is a group that has shipped hundreds of games serving well over 100 million players. Over the past two decades, we've personally seen game titans rise and fall. Surely there are patterns and cycles. So we listed dozens of examples of great design environments and dozens more of times where design remained shackled. And over and over again, the same themes came up.

To guide game designers and the profession forward we wrote down a Declaration of Game Designer Independence. This document is primarily for the designers who run their own companies or the creative directors who own the creative process. It is also for the designers in the trenches, who aspire to a leadership role.

The following is a code for how great, visionary designers should behave. It rises up from an immense well of hard fought experience accumulated over decades of real world design. When followed, these practices sustain an environment where design thrives and revolutionary games are regularly brought forth into the world.

The Declaration of

Game Designer Independence

1. Without game design, there is nothing

You can get rid of visuals, music, business or technology and we will still make great games.

2. Designers must drive the vision of the game

We are prime movers, not replaceable cogs.

3. We dedicate ourselves to the lifelong mastery of design

Dilettantes need not apply.

4. We strive to be renaissance designers

We fluently speak the languages of game development and business:

We speak the language of creative. All art and music ultimately serves the game play.
We speak the language of production. Game design determines the scope and need for the content that production shepherds.
We speak the language of engineering. Technology is one tool that enable the experiences designers choose.
We speak the language of business. Modern monetization, retention and distribution are directly driven by game systems.

5. We will not be silenced

We tirelessly promote our vision both internally and to the public.

6. We fearlessly embrace new markets and trends

We then reinvent them to be better.

7. We demand the freedom to fail

Design advances through experimentation.

8. We have a choice:

Create with our own voices or sell our talents into servitude.

My personal thoughts

Not everything here is easy. To live up to this declaration, you likely need to be a better designer than you are right now. Still, always remember: You are not a slave. You are not a servant. You are not a cog-like employee. You are a creative force. And most importantly you have a choice for how you wish to spend your time on this earth. You can choose to take control of your life and change the world for the better in the process.

I personally left a large company with a steady paycheck in order to take control of my creative destiny. Now I've got multiple game designs speeding towards completion, I'm working with people with souls and the future looks amazing. This is easily the most productive and exciting time of my life. And the only reason it happened was because I realized a fundamental truth: Design works best when it leads, not when it serves.

If you support the Declaration, drop a comment below. Pass it on via Twitter, Facebook, Email, Forums and more. Pass it on to the people who need it the most.

take care,

Danc.

PS: For a more in-depth look at our report, check out the Project Horseshoe website. There are some wonderful reports this year.

Happy 2011: Celebrating frontiers in Game Design

2010-12-31T16:51:00.000-08:00

When the frontiers go away, culture turns inward and begins eating itself. For a brief period of time at the turn of the century, we saw our beloved game industry fall into the trap of thinking 'there is nothing new under the sun.' It was a dark time where risk adverse publishers and platform owners made bigger bets on more-of-the-same. Independent developers were dropping like flies. Bloodier methods of shooting demonized minorities in the head were considered to be "innovation".

Thankfully, new frontiers emerged as the old inward looking industry has shattered into multiple billion dollar markets seeking to bring gaming to the rest of the world. Mobile and Social games are just the tip of the iceberg of the evolutionary explosion that is pushing games into every crevice of society. Look around! The grand spirit of exploration and innovation is once again thriving like almost no other time in gaming history.

To ring in 2011, here is a list of frontiers in game design. This list is not complete, but it gives some hint at the vast breadth of games still left to be designed. If you come across someone who claims that all games have already been designed or that game design is a solved problem, show them this list. And then challenge them to stop fiddling about with over-exploited games from decades past and make something new and wonderful that will change the world. Go west, young man.

What is a frontier?

My rules of thumb for defining a game design frontier:

Can you easily create a new genre of game? A game like Flight Control defines the line drawing genre on mobile devices. This is an entirely new and deep placespace that designers will be exploring for years to come.
Can you use an old genre to reach a new audience? It doesn't matter that social games use systems beloved by 14-year old boys playing BBS door games 20-years ago. The frontier arises from adapting those systems into a game enjoyed by 45-year old moms.

Frontiers in Game mechanics

Game mechanics are the systems that beat at the heart of the game. They are unique combinations of rules, feedback and interfaces that create a playspace within which the player gains deep skills. Of all the frontiers, new game mechanics creates the boldest and most wide ranging opportunities.

Social games: Games that tap the social networks in order to improve relationships and facilitate developer controlled distribution. Facebook has staked out an obvious stand, but email, mobile phones and Twitter all have roles to play. Any system where you can communicate asynchronously with other people enables social gameplay. Think big and don't be blinded by erudite fear mongers braying about Farmville. One lone tree does not define the forest of opportunity.
Board and card games: The wave of new design that came out of Germany is still spreading and recombining in new ways. New mechanics appear on a regular basis and new genres (such as the deck building game popularized by Dominion) keep popping up. Board games are the ancient soul of game design and the fact that innovation is still possible after thousands of years gives me immense hope for the future of games.
Touch-based game: All games are built of a foundation their most fundamental interactive verbs. For years, the most basic verb has been 'push the button'. Now we have a radical new vocabulary of swiping, flicking and pinching. If a platform game is about the joy of movement using buttons what foundational new genres will emerge from touch interfaces?
Motion-based games: Take all the possibilities of touch-based gaming and multiply the design challenges by 10x. Using the human body as a controller rips asunder our most basic assumption of how to interact with a machine. Also our bodies are intimately tied to how we feel emotion and experience the world. There are deep skills and new pathways of applied psychology just waiting to be turned into games.
Story games: The old genre of roleplaying games has spawned a new set of stripped down mechanics that minimize combat and maximize player generated stories.
Art games: How can systems convey messages? Jason Rohrer's work exemplifies both the aesthetics and the power of this game design movement.
Performance games: Game no longer need to exist in the living room. Performance games involve groups of people coming together to play new games. They turn streets into a Pacman games or Grocery carts into a multi-player game of Asteroids.
Music games: A product such as Rock Band 3 hints at what can happen when games help unlock mastery of centuries of music and culture. Games can act as training systems that rely on intrinsic motivation and are scalable to millions at minimal incremental cost. At stake is nothing less than the radical commoditization of learning to play music by reducing both monetary and psychological entry barriers.
Exercise games: What if exercise was social, inexpensive, varied and fun instead of a repetitive, expensive chore? The new generation of gamers will be athletes, not couch potatoes. The next 5-year increase in human life span will come from gamers living healthy lives reinforced by the games they play.
Gamification: Games are applied psychology and can used to improve the experience of almost any process in the world today, from blogging to CRM to using Microsoft Word. Games are the next evolution of modern user experience and usability design. Instead of merely asking how to make a task possible or efficient, games ask "How do we transform a task into a delight?" Games can return humanity to the mechanical processes of the modern world.
Location games: As mobile phones with GPS proliferate, we can track our position in the physical world across huge populations of potential players. What are game designs that make location and a sense of place matter?
Pan-media games: Alternate reality games weave stories and community driven puzzles across websites, social networks, TV ads, chat, toys and print. How do we make powerful games that layer an alternate world over the top of our world and enable communities to interact with our evolving dance of creation using all the modern media available? Why limit yourself to a single screen?
Augmented reality games: Image processing lets us place virtual objects in images and video, annotating and transforming the everyday into reality plus.
Creativity games: When you ditch the idea that games are acts of absolutely authorial control, you realize that the act of playing is an act of creation. Let's multiply this player impulse, not constrain it. User generated content games like Minecraft or Spore hint at the creation of of dozens of future communities of creative individuals. Inside these community are artistic works enabled and facilitated by the game worlds we create. What happens when designers give up direct authorial control and empower millions of players to build a utopia?
Conference games: Anywhere there is a concentration of like minded people, you can build a game that creates deeper connections. A slew of conference games, played with pamphlets and business cards transform the often unreliable networking process into a joyful act of structured exploration. Can you help connect the minds of the professionals who are busy pushing forward business, research and more?
Education games: At the pace of a tortoise moving towards a treat spotted many hours ago, the educational community has started making educational games worth a damn. Since games enable players to gain an experiential understanding of complex models, they are one of the few ways of teaching wisdom instead of rote book learning. The tricky bit? Games are great at teaching, but you need to make great games first and foremost. The influx of real game developers driving the efforts has produced wonderfully playable titles like CellCraft and there are dozens of similar projects occurring throughout the world.
Massively concurrent games: What games can you build with 10,000 people playing at once? 1 vs 100 was a start, but there are opportunities in stadiums, movie theaters, flash mobs and of course online. As populations of players scale, the psychology of player inactions shifts and entirely new designs need to be deployed. Yet the payoff is impressive; if 100,000 people spent fifteen minutes doing something meaningful, what could they accomplish?
High retention games: With the advent of metrics, we are finally realizing how few people play our games for any length of time. The last third of your game? Sorry, didn't play it. Metric combined with iterative design finally give us the power to tune our games so they actually work as we think they should work. With the next generation of metrics, we are gaining new insights into intrinsic motivation. What makes people tick? What makes them happy? What improves their lives? As a result, we have the tools to make better games. You can no longer fake it and try to claim success with handwaving comments about art and meaning. If your game sucks, people leave. Can you make empirically validated games that deliver enough meaning and value that smart, informed people want to play for long periods of time?

Frontiers in Business models

The other way to create new genres is to create games that fit new business models. These impose new constraints and open up new ways of thinking about play.

Games as services: For much of the past two decades, games have been treated as consumable media: you play a game, beat it and move on to the next tasty treat. When a game is run as a service, we are running an endless game that grows and evolves with the community. Most are inherently multi-player and can just as easily be described as economies, governments or clubs as they can a game. Such games are not media. They are entirely new cultures, some of which will outlive their founders.
Free-to-play games: Games have finally broken free of the shackles of a single fixed price model. Now players can try a game, see if they like it and pay a little or a lot in order to experience more. This single development opens games to massive audiences that never before would have paid 60 bucks for a new experience they may not enjoy.
Downloadable console games: With smaller download budgets and long tail competition, larger developers are forced to give up many of their wasteful AAA ways and find the fun in small packages. Though platforms and publishers are desperate to maintain their demeaning practices of control and leverage over contractually enslaved developers, market pressures have so far enabled small bursts of innovation to flourish on consoles for the first time in many years. Enjoy the now fading days of summer while it lasts.
Downloadable PC games: The indie movement combined with relatively hands off distribution partners like Steam offer both a means of making money and freedom to create new types of games. Online communities help drive marketing and it is telling that the downloadable smash hit of the year, Minecraft, came out on PC, not the console.
Sponsored games: Traditional companies have awoken to the fact that hundreds of millions of people play games and they want to either own this ability (Disney) or to have the experiences that games create associated with their products.
Viral distribution systems: Developers are traditionally screwed because middle men control monetization and distribution. Viral distribution systems lets savvy developers empower players to distribute their game, reducing the power of the middle men and freeing developers from entangling relationships.
In game payments and offers: The vast array of payment system puts monetization in the hands of the developer, not the distribution channels, creating a new path for developers to gain independence from the sharecropping models practiced by publishers and retail channels. There are rotten spots growing in the form of Facebook and Apple's emerging payment monopolies. Ultimately, the value driven by the game design is what player are buying. With this in mind, smart developers should carve out niches where they keep the majority of the value and payment providers are slowly but surely forced to become low cost providers of baseline services.
Publicly funded games: Outside of the United States (where we are still arguing about evolution), games are considered a meaningful art that contributes to the economy and culture of a country. Canada, Australia, Singapore and many others offer low cost grants for teams that want to make games. Most new teams need traditional publisher funding like a slave needs an owner.

Frontiers in platforms

Browser games: At 500 million and growing, games played in browsers represent one of the largest gaming platforms on the planet. Flash is the current mainstay and 3D is barely present in the form of Unity. But the important thing about browser games is the reach.
Mobile games: We are starting to carry games with us wherever we go. What will you do with a billion potential players, always on internet, GPS, address books, in-game payments, augmented reality and a device that is within reach every waking second of the day?
Tablet games: Games for tablets mean new UI conventions and new multiplayer models (gather everyone around the table) The cross pollination between tablet games, smartphone games and board games is going to create some inevitable classics.
The plethora of screens: eReaders are really just the tip of the iceberg. My electric toothbrush has a screen now and I play a game on it every night. Anything with a screen can play games. They don't need to be fast screens. They don't need to be big screens. Great games happen in the player's head. All we need as game designers is some basic feedback systems and an input method. With that, we can put games anywhere.

Fading opportunities

There are really only three fading opportunities that come to mind.

Retail games: The retail market has long been a cesspool of corrupt distribution practices, crippled monetization, entrenched middlemen and oppressed developers meekly serving the Man. It is still possible to innovate here, but your chances are reduced by an order of magnitude for every layer of management piled atop the line developers.
Casual games: There are three, maybe four stagnant genres left powering (Hidden object/Adventure, Time management, Match Three) the casual games market. With the deadly drop in prices during the recession and the enormous power of portals like Big Fish, developers have retained almost zero bargaining power. Innovation rarely flourishes and the death crawl towards bigger budgets and winner-takes-all releases is in full swing. Games with bloated production values like Drawn just make me sad. We've been there. We went down the path of prettier graphics. Notice that the adventure genre has died before? Ever wonder why?
MMOs and virtual worlds: Somewhere along the line, the MMO genres calcified. Old mechanics turned into religious commandments, bright experiments floundered and innovation stopped. Instead of building better games, we got prettier graphics and more baroque consumable content. The next deluge of overstuffed AAA games just hasten the genre decline with their expensive and inevitable implosions. There was a brief ray of hope with F2P RPGs and kids MMOs, but this spurt appears short lived. The interesting lessons of these games have been stripped out and rendered down into the overly simple rules that drive many social games. I have some hope. It is still possible for independent companies to enter the market without the help of publishers/operators and create a new game that turns genre conventions upside down. If anything, it will be a team from the social games space or the browser space. Such a team could create an accidental variant of an MMO that ends up reigniting the market. Fingers crossed.

Conclusion

In the past few years, we've seen the emergence of two multi-billion dollar markets in the form of social and mobile games. This is only the beginning. Expect another billion dollar market to emerge in the next 5 years and at least three new billion dollar markets to pop up over the next ten years. The game industry is dead. Long live the game industries.

The people who tap these opportunities will not be those that stayed at home sucking down a steady paycheck from an aging company mired in incestuous politics and egotistical dreams. It will be the designers who strike out and tackle the frontiers head on. Be the settler of a dangerous new land. Define the new face of games for the coming decades.

Happy New Year. May you have an amazing 2011.
Danc.

PS: Big thanks to the crew at Project Horseshoe and Nick Fortugno in particular for starting this conversation one late night when we had absolutely no right to be up and still talking. What are we? Giddy teenagers at a sleepover?

Story as evolutionary success or failure lessons

2010-12-11T23:32:00.000-08:00

Idle thoughts for a rainy December evening.

Viral player stories. When you create games with deep systems, player run into amazing, emergent scenarios on a regular basis. From these moments of player experience grow myths and legends. Players tell them. Press repeats them. Your game goes viral without requiring any of the whirring, queasy machinations of your local social network dealer.

Why does this occur? It happens without prompting. It requires no points, no bribes. It is as if, after the right experience, the urge to tell stories bubbles up innately from inside even the least imaginative human.

A story, at an evolutionary level, is a lesson in success or failure intended to improve the survival rate of the tribe. This is why we create them. This is why we share them. This is why we consume them. Like play, story (even fiction) serves a function. Good stories were at one point a matter of life, death and reproduction. Humans have a nose for truths and when we spot them amidst the maelstrom of daily experience, we instinctively share them.

When we, as game designers, create meaningful systems whose depths are only revealed after a process of deep mastery, players instinctively extract stories from their experiences within these playscapes and pass them on to their friends and family. "When I kicked the soccer ball, my foot slide on the wet grass and I heard a distant sickening crunch in my knee." To experience a unique lesson that you've learned in your bones after a thousand trials is to hold a treasure. And being human, we can't help but share. Over and over and over again.

A critical realization for a game designer is that meaningful success and failure, the basis of stories, can only exist in the context of the systems and value structures we design. A gripping tale of trust crushed in a game such as Eve exists because a designer made a very explicit set of rules that defined the concept of economic value and politics and trust. Remove the value structures inherent in the design and the stories go away.

One sign of a great game is therefore not the story that the designer tells, but instead one that contains mechanics robust enough to yield player experiences rife with lessons that must be shared. As an exercise, look at the mechanic (apples, trees, 9.8m/s^2) and the story of gravity (Apple falls on Newton's head) as two distinctly separate elements. The designer's role is not to tell the story of Newton and the apple. Players will perform that service just fine. Instead, our unique role in the process is to define and polish the system of gravity.

Don't build games in order to tell a single story. Build meaningful systems that create an explosion of culture, spread by the players who are absolutely thrilled to share what they've learned.

take care,
Danc.

References:
Nethack, Populous, Lemmings, Sims, SimCity, Minecraft, Spelunky, Fantastic Contraption, Dwarf Fortress, Team Fortress, Ultima Online, Civilization and some I've forgotten. Any others that you feel compelled to share?

Steambirds: Survival: Goodbye Handcrafted Levels

2010-12-03T09:53:00.000-08:00

Steambirds: Survival, the sequel to our original steampunk airplane strategy game was just released today. You can go play it right now at Steambirds.com.

Steambirds: Survival takes place on a grim fall morning at the start of the Battle of London. The British forces are taken by surprise as thousands of Axis steam-planes descend upon the doomed city. Outnumbered and outgunned, your heroic mission is to delay the invaders long enough that a handful of civilians might escape the genocidal gas attacks. You have one plane. How long can you last?

David has a great post about how we integrated microtransactions, but today I wanted to focus on a couple of design lessons that came up while building Steambirds: Survivial.

Removing handcraft levels as a method of finding deeper fun
Create game modes, not levels
Corollary: Focusing on static levels decreases the depth of your game.

Find deeper fun by killing levels

Steambirds: Survival started with the observation that the core mechanic of maneuvering planes was fun independent of the level design. When we were building the first game, we'd toss in enemy planes nearly at random and interesting combat scenarios would emerge. My personal design process is highly exploratory: I examine a working prototype, identify whiffs of an opportunity and then attempt to amplify those desirable moments in the next iteration. The lack of levels was one such opportunity.

What if we built a version of Steambirds that relied entirely on randomly generated levels where planes came at you in ever increasing waves? In essence, create the Steambirds version of Gears of War 'Horde mode'. This path harkens back to the escalating arcade mode found in Asteroids, Space Invaders or most traditional arcade games.

At first, we randomly spawned planes and saw how the game played out. Then we polished the systems until the game was fun to play every single time. I observed several higher level attributes of this design process.

No preferred perspective: We were forced experience the gameplay from a variety of perspectives. When I create static levels, it is easy to quickly fall into a rut where I start polishing the experience for one or two 'correct' paths. If a specific scenario is too powerful, I might simply adjust the health of an individual enemy instance so the player has less difficulty. The result is localized polish that translates into shallow gameplay. With random levels, this class of tweaking is impossible.

Fig 1: Polishing a single scenario and a single success path leads to polishing only a narrow portion of the playspace

System-level iteration: In order to polish the experience, we instead needed to iterate and polish at the system-level, not the content level. Most changes occurred in the planes, powerups and scoring. These are systems that affected the entire player experience. In the end, a much broader playspace ends up being polished.

Fig 2: Polishing a variety of scenarios leads to polishing a broad set of systems that yields a deep playspace

Depth through new systems: When the game wasn't engaging, we added new systems such as having downed planes drop powerups. A more traditional approach might be to manually create more detailed scenarios with surprise plot points where a pack of planes pop out of a hidden cloud when you collide with a pre-determined trigger. However, by instead focusing on new general systems, we created an entire universe of fascinating tactical possibilities. Do you head for the heal powerup or do you turn to face the Dart at 6 o'clock? That's a meaningful decision driven by systems, not a cheap authored thrill.

The self imposed constraint of avoiding the creation of static content in the form of hand crafted levels resulted in a game that is in my humble opinion, more enjoyable than the original Steambirds. Personally, I'm going to continue using this philosophy of limiting static levels in future games because I see the following benefits

More game for less overall effort: You can play Steambirds: Survival for dozens (if not hundreds) of delightful hours. Yet development time was considerably less than if we had handcrafted an equivalent number of puzzle levels. .
Deeper gameplay with a longer mastery curve. I've played a lot of Steambirds: Survival and I still find new skills and tricks that keep me coming back. At a certain level of depth, a game transcends being a disposible blip and turns into a life-long hobby. We aren't quite yet at a hobby-class activity with Steambirds, but this design process inevitably leads us there. As a designer, I feel like I'm wasting my life when I create a disposable game. I feel like I've contributed in a meaningful way if I can create an evergreen activity that attracts a community that last far into the future.

Create game modes, not levels

As designers, we have access to a much broader exploration of the space created by a set of game rules than is available to the player. During development, it is common to run crazy experiments where speed is doubled or health knocked down to nothing. Most of these variations are unplayable, so we chop them from the final product.

Yet a handful of tweaks end up being fascinating. I think of these areas much like the Goldilocks zone for planets. In order for life to exist, a planet must be close enough to the sun to be warm and far enough away so that it isn't boiled. These two factors create a thin band around a sun in which a habitable planet may exist. The same thing happens with games. You push a particular variable too far and the game stops being enjoyable. But within a certain range, the possibility for fun exists. This experimentation helps use define the valid playspace for a particular set of mechanics.

For Steambirds Survival, we took some time to discover the limits of the combat system. We spent hours tweaking various variables, and testing to see if they were fun. The goals was to build a multi-dimensional map of where the fun lurked in the Steambirds mechanics. In the end, we took snapshot of the various gameplay variables in 24 initial states and saved these out as unique planes that you can play. The long range sniping Aught Nine plays quite differently from a delicately swooping Chickadee-S518 The result is really 24 game modes, each of which is infinitely playable.

Level design vs initial conditions

How is this different from level design?

Instead of creating content that can be enjoyed only a handful of times, we are setting up game modes that can be played a very large number of times.
How each mode unfolds is primarily determined by game mechanics, not a set of scripted events. As a result there is a very wide range of possible scenarios, not a single predetermined outcome.
Modes are modular, robust and loosely coupled so that tweaking critical values is rarely damaging to the mode's fun. Level design is fragile because you are trying to squeeze fun out of a very narrow playspace. One tiny mistake and the experience is broken. However, when you have a big broad playspace and you've plunked the player smack in the middle of a wide Goldilocks zone, you have a lot of room to push variables about without harming the rich pleasures of the game.

Mapping the playspace

Here's the process I used to map the playspace and create the various play modes.

Identify: Identify the variables. Many of the important variables in the original Steambirds were hidden away in code. Andy surfaced these in an XML file so they could be readily tweaked.
Explore: Methodically explore the space. I created a matrix of planes, each with one variable pushed to the extreme. Then I played them. The majority were unplayable and I'm not sure a single one made it into the final game. However, through the process of testing concrete variations, I gained a sense for what worked and what didn't. I was mapping out the Goldilocks zone.
Theorize: Now that I had some data, I created theories for fun planes. "I think that a slow, short range plane that needed to trap enemies in webs of poison trails would result in interesting tactics"
Test: Then I would change a few variables and try it out. Did the theory yield a new way of playing the game?
Refine: At this point, we'd iterate on the plane many, many times to get the feel just right.
Cull: We made a lot of planes. Some were more fun than others so those got chopped and the good ones stayed. This follows the philosophy of designing from a position of plenty, where you are overflowing with good content and can choose to put forth only the best.

Static levels decreases the depth of your game

Let's take a step back and look more broadly at what this simple observation means for the industry at large. There is a very real opportunity cost associated with creating static level content. In fact, it is baked into the pre-production and production stages suggested by the popular Cerny method of game development. During preproduction, you test and finalize your game mechanics. By locking down your game systems early on, you reduce your production risk when building large amounts of static content. Heaven forbid you change the jump distance on your main character after you've built 20 expensive levels based off that value.

At first glance this staged approach seems like a sane and rational practice. In fact, it originally came about as a way of giving design a place to iterate within the increasingly rigid development schedule. However, it also requires that you limit your iteration upon your mechanics at some point in your schedule. Yet such a design lock down conflicts with how design actually occurs in the real world.

Consider the common scenario: a designer, after playing the game for several months, finally groks a fundamental relationship in the system that will make the game immensely more enjoyable. This actually happens all the time...designs often need to sit for a while before they reveal their true nature. We are closer to mathematicians exploring a new class of equations than we are authors banging out another variation of the Hero's Journey. And like mathematicians, insight rarely occurs on a predictable schedule.

In a procedural game, a new design insight translates into a quick experiment that tests the idea. Many of our big design changes in Steambirds: Survival took minutes. The largest, a new progression system, took a week. In a game with a heavy production burden, a new design insight instead provokes immediate push back. Almost all other disciplines have something to lose since almost any mechanics change occurring in the middle of production has two follow-on effects:

Design changes during production threaten to invalidate many man years of labor. The producer sees a threatened schedule. The level designers see destroyed levels. The gameplay programmers see destroyed scripts. The narrative designers see altered plot lines and discarded cinematics. The reality of modern development is that any design change in production has a large political cost.
If the change is accepted, large amounts of new content needs to be implemented. Even if the design change is the right thing to do for the player, it is often economically not feasible.

As a result, polishing and improvement on the game design is almost always locked down prematurely. It is not random chance that nearly every postmortem wishes they had a longer preproduction phase. The entire Cerny method creates logistical constraints that unwittingly damage the team's ability to build and iterate on deep and meaningful systems.

Agile methods help here by allowing teams to lock down content on a more modular level, but this is a patch, not a solution. Ultimately static content is inherently difficult to refactor. The marginal cost to change content is often equal to original cost of creation. The reliance of the design on structurally brittle content like levels and narrative lies at the root of the problem of premature design lock-down.

After many years of living this reality, modern AAA development teams have retreated from most meaningful exploration of deep game systems. Over time, economics and production logistics shape design as surely as the currents in the ocean shape the rocky shoreline. If you look at games like God of War or Uncharted, you see the end result: Mechanically safe and simplistic games heavily larded up with a constant streams of static content. There is no meaningful systems to learn nor choices for the player to make. Instead, players submit themselves to a constant stream of pretty pictures whilst bashing buttons to advance. By following the siren's call of 'evocative' static content, most AAA teams have managed to suffocate the playspaces that make games great.

As a movie-trained consumer looking for mindless escape, I understand the appeal. As a game designer, I find this direction repugnant. We have a unique medium capable of immersing players in a rich systematic understanding of complex models of the universe. It is time for a very different philosophy of design that minimizes static content and level design and maximizes the impact of game mechanics and meaningful systems.

With Steambirds: Survival, we were able to create relatively major changes to the gameplay late in development. What little static content existed was highly modular, contained few dependencies on other systems and was therefore quite robust in the face of changes.

I highly recommend that you distance yourself from handcrafted static levels. Cull linear structures and content dependencies. Treat production as a form of waste that should be stripped from your development process. These elements destroy your ability to iterate on your design and suck you into a mediocre and limited vision of what games can become.

Conclusion

When I look at back at the origins of electronic games with their infinite arcade modes and their procedural levels, I see the seed of something great. Somewhere along the way we took a wrong turn, away from interesting interactive systems and towards static disposable content. For decades we've been investing outrageous sums of money in production activities that actively diminish the key value proposition of our interactive craft.

My goal with the games I work on is to shift the balance back toward gameplay. Throwaway bits of plot and puzzle are still useful as training that gets players into the game. They are great as the occasional dash of spicy emotional seasoning. We have such things in Steambirds, modularized and tucked in the background where they belong. But they are not, nor should they ever be, the meaty center of the experience.

What I've been describing with my last few posts is a philosophy of how I prefer to design games...a school of efficient game design, if you will. The pillars I've discussed to far are simple stated:

Use design to lower costs: By following efficient design practices, we can build world changing games at low cost. Escalating cost curves are a symptom of broken design practices.
Always evergreen: Deeper, more meaningful systems yield lifelong hobbies, not disposable media.
New games: Design from the root using iterative, exploratory design to create unique, differentiated products. Clones are projects for wage cogs and poor designers.
Small teams: Leverage the immense creativity, flexibility and productivity of small teams of co-creators. Large teams destroy efficiency.
Robust play spaces: Create broad landscapes of possibility that can easily withstand both player and designer induced variation. Avoid brittle structures.
Lean Content: Unchain our ability to iterate on design by reducing our debilitating dependency on puzzles, levels and other static content.
Leverage Players: Our designed systems seed value structures that empower players to create stories, community and culture. The deepest dramas happen in the players' heads, not in our labored delivery.

The existence of a school of game design does not mean that all games need to follow these constraints and processes. If anything we need passionate variety more than we need a theocracy of design. Instead, a school of design acts as one (hopefully of many) beacons for thinking designers. We look to the past and call out our long history of mistakes and successes. We look to the future by building concrete works of art that boldly promote the lessons learned.

Design is first and foremost a conscious act and we should take an educated and thoughtful stance on what styles of design we pursue and what ones we reject. Steambirds: Survival is a simple game, but it is one that is designed based on a passionately held ideals. To make games due to habit, fads, instinct or pursuit of a mundane paycheck means that you are wasting not only your life but the lives of all your players. A thing blindly created is always a thing blindly consumed. What is your stated philosophy of game design? What are the beliefs that drive your creation?

Give Steambirds: Survival a try. There is still so much more work to do, but this should give a small taste of where we are heading.

take care,
Danc.

Steambirds: Now out for iPhone, iPad and Android

2010-11-11T15:26:00.000-08:00

Have I mentioned that this was a busy week? Monday saw the release of our new Kindle game Panda Poet. Yesterday, we release not one game, but two games. The first is Steambirds for iOS. The second is Steambirds for Android.

Indie legends Adam Saltsman and Eric Johnson from Semi-Secret handled the iPhone and iPad versions. They've been leveraging their experience with Canabalt and Gravity Hook to help navigate the wild west of AppStore relevancy. Check out that gorgeous new title screen...there are also all new plane graphics. You can pick up the iPhone version for 99 cents or you can splurge on the HD iPad version for $1.99. You are so totally worth it.

Victor Chelaru from Flat Red Ball handled the Android version. They did some amazing work optimizing the UI to work on Android phones. The performance was tweaked until the whole experience feels smoother than the silky fine fur of a baby beaver's bottom. Try it and you'll see what I'm talking about. There is a limited launch promo price of 99 cents that only lasts till November 17th. Then it gets expensive.

Long ago when I was first playing around with the Surface at Microsoft Research, I dreamt that one day in the far future I'd be able to play a game just like Steambirds. There is just something incredibly tactile about a big screen and those little chunky planes that just beg to be dragged about. The thought of it makes my fingertips vibrate. The touch friendly Steambirds UI plus the big screen on an iPad were meant for each other.

Lessons

Here are two very basic design lessons from this particular set of releases.

Strive for simple interfaces. We often get caught up in adding buttons; new feature = new button. But my favorite designs are ones that start out feeling almost too simple. There are big benefits. Simple interfaces are easier to transfer to highly divergent platforms. Simple interfaces are also easier for new users to learn. There doesn't need to be a trade off; you can have both a simple interface and immense gameplay depth. This is probably the one design challenge that I obsess about more than any other: how do you create layers of depth in the player's mind, not in the user interface? It isn't the easiest problem to solve, but when you see it, you know you are in the presence of great design.
If you've got gameplay magic, bottle it up and spread it wide and far. 10 million unique users have played Steambirds. The gameplay resonates quite broadly. The question is not 'which platform should I target?', but instead "how do I reach as many customers as possible across all viable platforms?"

Alright, I'm breathless. If you have an Android or iOS device, grab a copy of Steambirds and let me know what you think. Think of it as a vote for deep, great indie games on your phone.

All the best,
Danc
(...heading back to his design cave to make more games...the year isn't over yet and we've got more goodness to release.)

Lost Garden

Understanding randomness in terms of mastery

Discerning cause and effect from noise

Randomness as a form of noise

Skills for player modeling of randomness

New player mistakes due to model ignorance

Balancing for skill in games of luck

Progression considerations in games of luck

Black hat techniques

Conclusion

References

Building Tight Game Systems of Cause and Effect

Tight and Loose systems

Techniques for adjusting tightness

Applying the tightening techniques

Tightness vs the stage of player mastery

Conclusion

Goodbye Realm of the Mad God

Looking to hire unicorn programmer for Spry Fox

Prototyping challenge: Make a web-based 3D modeling toy

Model Toy

Shapes

Basic move, scale and translate operations

There are big limits on the shapes

Shape Toolbar

One system for defining hidden control handles

What this toy lacks

Extending to 3D

Other shape Properties

Open questions

Near Future

Export options

Far future

Conclusion

Prototypes!

Loops and Arcs

Loops

Arcs

Mixing Loops and Arcs

The growth of arcs in games

Untangling loops and arcs in existing game forms

A brilliant future for loops

Conclusion

Giving a talk at plague stricken GDC 2012 on sexy-sexy innovation

Standing up for ourselves

The Real Triple Town available on iOS and Android

Plagiarism as a moral choice

Thought: Most professional game developers are also professional plagiarists

Where plagiarism differs from evolving key innovations of the past

The economic and human cost of plagiarism

Plagiarist pride

Plagiarism is a moral choice

Panda Poet: My most social design

Putting the social into a game

Links

Other Notes

Steambirds: Survival Mobile

Does your game have a clear "Arrow of Play"?

Tools for creating the arrow of play

Triple Town Beta (Now with Bears)

Bears, bears everywhere

Tuning emotions

Monsters or children?

Avoiding dissonance

Deriving the world's metaphor from gameplay

Differences from traditional theme generation

Conclusion

References

Cheat sheet: Steps for tuning primary emotions

Note: OCC Model of emotions

Note: Surrealism in video games

Shadow Emotions and Primary Emotions

Brief thoughts on memory and emotion

Narrative as a means of playing emotional scenarios

Shadow Emotions

Primary emotions in games

Conclusion

References

Realm of the Mad God Released!

Indies Innovate